Category: Small Business Productivity

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Recommend us for a reward

These days you can promote the fact you like something very quickly and easily. Twitter and Facebook accounts are free and almost everyone knows how to use them. Established blogging platforms like WordPress and Blogger are also easy and free to setup but there are even simpler microblogging platforms like Posterous.

What’s so good about all this new technology that is available? It means you can sign up for affiliate accounts and start earning money from referring good quality website to people you know or are connected to. Here’s a link to a post we wrote earlier this year which explains a bit about how affiliate marketing works.

We are trialling a new affiliate service for our online MYOB course and the reward is $25 for a successful sale from your recommendation. Don’t worry the affiliate management system keeps track of your referrals. Here’s a link to the affiliate website.

Posted on by — 2 Comments

How to create a new WordPress blog post

If you are receiving this as an email, click the title to watch our instructional video.

Today the hardest part of keeping your website up to date is not the technology about how to do it but the craft of writing the right words. The writers at HatchCreate understand the writing skills needed to make you look professional and bring traffic and sales to your website. They are versed with the use of the 123ezy website builder and the WordPress personal website publishing system.

We recently organised the hosting and creation of a simple website for the Australian Cartooning College and the video in this blog shows you how simple it is to create your own WordPress blog post.

It’s important to note the similarity between the term “blog post” and “news article”, or “update” because that’s all a blog post is. If you don’t consider yourself a blogger or that your business has a blog don’t worry these are just jargon used to make the art of writing articles sound modern and high tech. This article by Steve Slisar explains a bit more about WordPress and business blogs.

Many mums and dads working from home as remote contractors can earn a good living as a writer by performing the writing tasks to keep a company’s website or newsletter up to date. Once you learn how to manage blogs using WordPress you can promote yourself as a Website content manager. But remember, you need to be a good writer.

If you want to receive our blog post articles as an email when they’re published, enter your email address below.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Steve training Excel and MYOB in December

If you are located in Sydney and want to attend an MYOB Day to Day Transactions course or Beginners Microsoft Excel 2007 before the festive season begins, you are in luck. Steve, who has created most of the EzyLearn content for computer software training is the trainer for the upcoming Excel and MYOB courses at Chatswood training centre Maxis Solutions.

Steve will use his humour and years of education experience to make the the learning of these software programs as simple and as quick as possible.

The one day courses are usually held on a Wednesday and you can enrol online using their secure and automatic enrolment service. Click the link below to enrol:

www.ezylearn.com.au/schedule

Posted on by — Leave a comment

MYOB Payroll – Employee Payment transaction video

The EzyLearn offer to MYOB students is simple. One price for access to all training resources (videos, workbooks and knowledge reviews) in a 12 month period including new updates. The MYOB Payroll course is part of www.myobcourse.com.au and it’s now ready for paying students to enrol. Included in this blog post is the 4th of 5 videos in part 1 of the course launched today.

This part of the course takes you through the sample company data file to highlight and explain how to navigate around and get information about employees, wages and other payroll categories, pay slips (Pay advices), pay cheques and other transaction information relating to Payroll.

If you are not already enrolled into the course you can choose the

  1. Full Access enrolment (no certificate), or
  2. Full Access enrolment (including assessment and certificate)

Enrol today!

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Earn money with phone bill analysis and Microsoft Excel

phone bill analysis example 2 - virion
phone bill analysis example - virion
phone bill analysis example - virion

One of the benefits of a spreadsheet is you can use a reasonably complicated spreadsheet over and over. One person goes to the effort of creating a spreadsheet and millions of people could potentially use that spreadsheet for a similar purpose.

The people at virion business grade voip have put a spreadsheet together to make it easier for them to perform price comparisons for their customers. The virion prices are fixed into the spreadsheet so all you need to do is enter in information about the costs on your phone bill and hey presto, phone bill analysis showing potential savings.

virion operates a distributed business model using “cloud based” software to manage and promote their business. Cloud computing is where your software operates over the internet, just like your banking and email applications like Hotmail and Gmail. Even powerful companies like MYOB are facing competition from cloud based solutions which are smaller, nimbler and more in tune with early adopters of new technology.

As part of the virion distributed business model they are seeking the help of remote contractors who are interested in earning money performing price comparisons for people they know as well as from leads provided by the company.

If you are interested in performing these tasks and earning money while working from home register as a remote contractor for further details as they come to hand.

If you want to take a look at the Microsoft Excel file that virion voip use for the phone bill analysis, please see the attachment to this blog post. Call Cost Comparison Spreadsheet v5 – RC

Posted on by — 2 Comments

VoIP Phone System from Virion

broadband speed test for voip phone system
is your internet fast enough for a voip phone system

We’ve updated our telephone system to the latest in Cisco IP phones and want to share the information with you because we think it’s ground breaking. We use our Broadband Internet connection to make and receive all our calls and that throws out the window the old concept of paying Telstra almost $40 per month just to have a telephone number. I was only just explaining to a friend today how the VoIP phone system from virion works and I’ll try to explain it again in this blog post.

Your Broadband Internet connection delivers the voice to your phones and takes it away to the people you call so this link is critical in the quality of your voip phone system. The best way of testing the quality of your broadband internet connection to run a speed test and see how fast your upload speeds are. Yes, I did say upload speeds. Most people want fast download speeds to download videos, emails and attachments, but with a voip phone system you need to have a broadband connection with good upload speeds.

In this diagram the upload speed is 0.81Mb/s (810Kbps) and the best quality VoIP phone system requires 87.2Kbps, so,theoretically 10 people in your office could be having phone conversations with your VoIP phone system using your broadband internet. But what if someone is sending an email with a huge attachment? I’ll keep you up-to-date with our VoIP experience as we use it.

If you want to test a business grade VoIP phone system and VoIP service take advantage of virion’s Instant Trial.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

How to convert a document or spreadsheet into a PDF file

If you are receiving this post as an email, click on the heading to go to our blog site and see the video that comes with it.

The benefits of a PDF file are:

  • most computers in the world will open it,
  • it maintains the look and feel of anything you can view on the screen and
  • it stops people from editing your files

Adobe Systems Incorporated are the owners of the PDF (Portable Document Format) standard and they have traditionally made money by making the viewer program available for free, but charging for the program which actually creates the PDF files. This is common with many other programs like Flash (for website animations) where you can download a player to view them, but you have to buy the software if you want to create them.

There are a number of applications available which allow you to easily convert any file you can print into a PDF. These files don’t necessarily have the full functionality that is available with the Adobe Acrobat “creator” software but many people don’t need these features.

The program we have found is CutePDF and the video attached to this post (click here or on the title if you are viewing this as an email) shows you how to download the program, install it and use it to convert files to PDF. Please feel free to send us some comments if you know of a better product or want to share your experiences.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

The admin area of a cartoon WordPress website

Cartooning can be a fun exercise, but it’s also a powerful way to get an idea or message across as Steve, Director of EzyLearn, discovered. “Cartooning involves picking the parts of a scene that stand out the most and exaggerating or highlighting it, sometimes it can be flattering sometimes uncomfortable” says Steve after completing a cartooning course with Gray Hopgood. “There is a surprising amount to understand and with practice I’ve started to see the results of these new found skills” says Steve.

The Cartooning College has provided cartooning courses for kids, adults and specialised markets who have used the courses to enable disadvantaged people express themselves creatively. They have created a new website built on the WordPress Content Management System (CMS) and Steve has produced some instructional videos about how to administer a WordPress site using the newly created website for the Cartooning College. Their website is www.cartooningcollege.com.au.

“I realised the power of cartoons back in 1992 when I had a british cartoonist called Johnjo draw a caricature of my face in my logo. It became an icon in Sydney’s Northern Beaches (with the aid of much newspaper advertising over the years)” confirms Steve.

The initial video of this course is included in this post so click on the title to go to our blog and watch the video to understand about creating and managing posts using WordPress. If you want to have your own WordPress website and learn the skills in a practical example take advantage of our 123ezy Webmasters course:.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

The right heading can bring people to you

The right heading on a flyer or a document will let you know immediately if that information on that page is “relevant” to you. It’s no different with a website. When you do a search in Google you decide in second which of the search results to go to depending on what they write in their title and description. Click the link in this blog post title to watch our video on Search Engine Optimisation.

EzyLearn offers the 123ezy website builder as part of a website hosting package and it makes it so simple to add (and change) words to the heading and description of each page within your website. Visit the 123ezy website for more information or take a look at a website that he been created using the SiteBuilder to see how it works.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Upgrading the MYOB data file for MYOB AccountRight Plus 19

You can’t have your old data file in the location where you’d like to put it. In AccountRight Plus 19 (the upgarde for MYOB Accounting Plus v18.5) the folder where all the files are stored is located at C:\Plus19.

The Training_Company exercise file used in our MYOB Bank Reconciliation course (#503) uses a datafile created in MYOB Accounting Plus v18 so it needs to be upgraded if you have downloaded the latest version. You can upgrade the file using the special program (found under the start menu) or by simply trying to open the file using the program.

This video takes you through the upgrade process. Click Here to see the elearning website, scroll to the bottom and you’ll see the topics covered in MYOB Bank Reconciliation 503. If you wish to enrol into the course you can enrol at the website mentioned above of visit our online ordering site for online courses by clicking here.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Downloading the MYOB Training Company data file

There is an exercise file used in our 503 – MYOB Bank Reconciliation course called Training_Company.MYO. This file is accessible via this link if you are a student: http://myobcourse.com/elearning/mod/resource/view.php?id=562. This file contains a nice simple collection of data and after you have completed the step-by-step exercises the bank reconciliation process is nice and simple.

We’ve used Google’s new Internet Browser called Google Chrome (which is very fast compared to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer), to show you how to access this datafile and get it onto your computer. This data file was created using MYOB Accounting Plus version 18 so if you are using a more recent version of the software you’ll need to upgrade the datafile using the upgrade assistant.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Navigate your way around MYOBCourse.com.au

I recently started a topic in a finance course I am doing with Kaplan Professional to discover that this tertiary qualification I am studying is done completely online. That means watching powerpoint slides with audio, reading a workbook and having access to an online forum if I have questions. Even the assignment task is submitted online and results received via the online learning portal.

My first thought was how interesting that a well reputed education institution stops having lectures altogether and I was a little disappointed that I wouldn’t have an opportunity to meet my fellow students and share stories and ask questions. After using the learning tools however I have come to the conclusion that the tools themselves are very useful and it re-affirmed our online training goals here at EzyLearn to become the number one source of online training in Australia for employment and productivity for small to medium businesses.

We have received help requests of how to get around our online learning websites so the video in this post is designed to give you a quick demonstration.

The production of the next MYOB course (MYOB Payroll) is underway and you’ll get a change to see these videos for free if you are a subscriber to this blog. This video is a small taste of the many more to come. Please feel free to comment or share this blog post with your friends. To visit the online MYOB course website, click here.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

All MYOB courses now sold separately

The people who want to use MYOB on a day to day basis don’t necessarily want to learn how to set it up from scratch or customise MYOB forms. This task is commonly performed by a bookkeeper or accountant and perhaps in the case of a micro business (or a sub contractor) by the business owner themselves. To accommodate the specific needs for business owners and employees alike, EzyLearn has changed the enrolment options for its online MYOB courses.

Late in May 2010 we introduced an Installment Payment option using PayPal for students who wanted to learn how to use the program but didn’t require a certificate, which reduced the cost considerably. Now you can enrol in each of the individual courses separately and for an amount that is very affordable.

It’s coming close to end of financial year and this is the best time for small business owners to learn how to use and eventually implement MYOB as their accounting software. It’s the best time to do the MYOB Setup Course that provides you with the software skills to create a new company from scratch and set it up for daily use. Click here to visit the online elearning website and see the outline of topics included in the course. This link also provides you with a Pay Now option to get started straight away.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Three MYOB courses for $29 per month for 4 months

Full access to myobcourse.com.au for 12 months is now available at the reduced price of $116 (paid off over 4 months). This is made possible by the new Installment Payment feature available on PayPal and you don’t need to have a PayPal account, you can use your credit card (even though PayPal make this process a little confusing to find).

The pricing has changed because we realised that not everyone wants a certificate at the end of their course, they simply want the skills on how to use MYOB on a day to day basis. Rather than simply give every attendee of the MYOB course a certificate just because they paid their enrolment fee EzyLearn students perform a bank reconciliation (and all the entries to make that possible) and email their datafile for assessment. This process of handling the datafile is time consuming and requires an experienced user to assess whether the tasks were performed correctly.

Our new pricing and installment plan is designed to make our course more accessible to a wider range of potential students who might not have the means to pay for it all up front. Visit the website www.myobcourse.com.au/elearning and look for the enrolment links at the right side of the website.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Half price online course in Microsoft Excel and MYOB with this voucher

With the changes that we’re making to our website it’s no surprise you can enrol into the Excel or MYOB online courses for 50% off (half price). We are upgrading our website using a fantastic community blog system call WordPress and if you receive this information via email, then you probably already know it. As a result we are able to combine many of our diverse services under one location and that includes the ability for you to purchase our online courses at discounted prices using discount vouchers.

Discount vouchers are simply a string of numbers that you enter into our shopping system to reveal a discount we are making this offer available to you until the end of this month. The discount voucher code that is available to you between today and 30th May is 888, and it entitles you to half price off our MYOB or Microsoft Excel courses. If you want to take advantage of the discount, go to our online training enrolment page and purchase an online course. Where you see the screen below, enter your code (888) and click update to see the new discounted price.

discount coupon for online training courses in Excel and MYOB
discount coupon for online training courses in Excel and MYOB

You might also be aware that we started a new opportunity for anyone to make promoting our online courses via a method called Affiliate Marketing. This enables you to promote a special code via facebook, email, twitter or anywhere that you can tell people about us, and if your friend enrols into a course after following your special link, you get $30! This system is managed by a completely independent company called clixgalore and if you’d like to learn more, visit our affiliate program page for MYOBcourse.com.au.

Stay tuned in the forthcoming weeks for information about ways that you can work from home using your computer skills as a remote contractor.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

MYOB training courses scheduled for Chatswood and Burwood

workbooks and videos for MYOB training coursesAnnouncing: EzyLearn and Maxis Solutions (RTO 91428) have just released the training schedule for courses in MYOB Accounting for Day to day transactions in both Chatswood and Burwood. These courses are scheduled conveniently during school hours of 9.30am to 3.30 so that mums can attend and get full value out of their day.

These courses cover the Sales, Purchases, Inventory and an introduction to the Banking modules of MYOB Accounting. If you don’t have the software there is a link to the freely downloadable Test Drive software that you can use to practise what you learn on your home or office computer.

The Topics in more detail are:

Creating quotes, orders and then invoices in the sales system, changing item information and credit terms “on the fly” while you are creating an invoice. Understand the different invoice formats, including time billing, how to create and delete text headings and more.

Finding historical transactions is a major part of accounting software. In this course you’ll learn about the Sales Register, Sales Journal, To Do list, Accounts Receivable and Payable reports and Custom lists, plus an introduction to Statements so that you can supply your clients with a summary of funds owing to you. You also learn about the two main type of statement so you can choose the one that suits your needs.

This course also includes recording cash sales, entering credits, settling credits, how to deal with bad debts, deleting sales payments, and reversing credits.

Payments: You’ll learn how to enter invoice and purchase payments including part payments and over payments.

Purchases: You’ll learn how to keep track of your purchases whether you pay for them straight away or receive an account. You will also learn how to create a purchase order, converting it to a bill, creating an item credit, settling and reversing credits, and analysing purchases.

Banking: If you make purchase or income transactions that have nothing to do with the sales or purchases modules, then you’ll learn how to make these entries using the banking module.

There is an early bird rate so visit the ordering site and book early to save money.

We closed our last training centre in 2006 and have taught thousands of students how to use MYOB accounting software since then because we offer

  1. All courses for one price,
  2. Training on various versions of the software,
  3. Training videos combined with knowledge review questions,
  4. MYOB Course Workbooks that act as an MYOB bookkeeping induction
  5. We’re accredited by the Institute of Certified Bookkeepers
  6. We offer a money back guarantee.

Discover more reasons to choose EzyLearn for your MYOB Training Courses.