Unless you’re a tradie with a Commercial “PowerPass” account with Bunnings you probably wouldn’t know about their fantastic system of keeping track of all your tax invoices.
It’s actually quite easy to get a PowerPass account and it’s very similar to using Flybuys. You go and buy all the things you need – like I did to erect the garden shed in our Job tracking and Projects case study for the MYOB and Xero Courses – and scan your card when you pay. You get a discount and your tax invoice is recorded in the Bunnings PowerPass system.
You just log into the PowerPass admin area and EVERY SINGLE invoice is available to you there!
This was the start of what seems to be an ongoing increase in the monthly subscription price for Xero. Xero appears to come across like a money hungry landlord that has you hooked on their software and wants to see how much they can extract from you.
It’s a big job to change accounting programs and like many software publishers Xero need to increase their subscription rate or earn more money by selling addons that they own – or they can charge a per employee rate for payroll services!
If you are starting a new business or switching back to MYOB Business from Xero learn how to use MYOB Business online with us.
If you are looking for work you are best to learn both version of MYOB: AccountRight and MYOB Business. They are available in our MYOB & Xero Bookkeeping Course Bundles.
MYOB has struggled for a long time against Xero but now seems to be in a sweet spot for price vs features.
MYOB is used by more than 1,000,000 users in Australia so it is a very good skill to have if you are looking for bookkeeping jobs or business admin jobs.
When we started delivering MYOB courses in a classroom in Dee Why in the late 1990’s I realised early that learning bookkeeping skills is best to do one step at a time. When I say 1 step I mean in training sessions that last no more than about 2-3 hours.
That’s why we created Micro courses in MYOB.
Visit the MYOB Training Course information page and see each of these different skill levels. You’ll see that it is based on the case studies I’ve written recently about like Flockana Cafe and Trim and Styles Hairdressing Salon.
Things are moving fast in the software industry as Intuit (QuickBooks), MYOB and Xero compete with each other with regular software updates. It has become so fierce that many students are enrolling into our Bookkeeping Academy Combination courses.
The key frontiers are still
automated data entry from bank feeds,
capturing receipts and extracting data,
faster reconciliation and
automatic calculations of taxes owed.
These are some of the features promoted by NAB Bookkeeper for NAB Business banking customers but what is MYOB’s huge announcement?
There are many finance professionals — who does your business need?
WE’VE MENTIONED PREVIOUSLY THAT finding a bookkeeper, when you may not know much about bookkeeping, can be a difficult task.
In fact, a lot of new business owners assume their accountant will take care of everything for them, which may be costly if their accountant has to perform a year’s worth of bookkeeping in order to file the business’s tax return. But bookkeepers and accountants can work harmoniously in your business.
As a general rule, every business needs at least two finance professionals working on their business accounts, but which two professionals you’ll need to hire depends on your business needs. If you’re not sure who you need to hire for your business, here’s a cheat sheet to help you out.
Bookkeepers (not registered with the TPB)
An independent bookkeeper not employed by an accountant and not registered with the Tax Practitioner’s Board (TPB) may only perform basic bookkeeping services, such as the
entering of receipts,
coding financial transactions,
generating invoices and purchase orders
accounts receivable and accounts payable
If you hire this type of bookkeeper, you’ll still need an accountant.
BAS agents
BAS agents must, by law, register with the Tax Practitioner’s Board (TPB), which certifies that they are qualified and have completed the necessary continuing education requirements to perform the tasks of a BAS agent, which involves carrying out most of the bookkeeping tasks mentioned above, in addition to preparing and lodging business activity statements on a business’s behalf.
If your business is registered for GST, you will need to file regular activity statements. If you hire a BAS agent, you’ll also need an accountant. In some instances, you may find a BAS agent who’s also a registered tax agent and vice versa, who may be able to take care of all your taxation needs.
Tax agents
Although tax agents, like BAS agents, must also register with the Tax Practitioner’s Board (TPB), a tax agent is focused on income tax — how much income you have to declare, how much you can claim back, etc.
This is distinct from a BAS agent who is concerned with the day-to-day financial tasks of your business (bookkeeping and BAS lodgements). That said, some tax agents will also perform some the basic bookkeeping tasks on a regular basis, though they primarily specialise in lodging tax returns.
If you’re not registered for GST, and your tax agent will also perform regular bookkeeping tasks (or you can do it yourself), you may not need to hire an accountant. In some instances, you may find a tax agent who’s also a registered BAS agent and vice versa, who may be able to take care of all your taxation needs.
Accountants
An accountant is mostly concerned with planning and strategy. Unlike bookkeepers and BAS or tax agents, an accountant will assess and advise you on what actions you should take to maximise your income. Great accountants will get involved with planning the direction of your business and ensure it’s been structured properly and that you’re meeting any additional tax obligations.
They’ll also help you to make strategic purchases for equipment and machinery, and work with your BAS agent or bookkeeper to ensure these decisions are reflected in your daily financial records. An accountant is also able to prepare and lodge tax returns on your behalf.
How much should I pay a bookkeeper?
Check out the National Bookkeeping Directory, which features the details of bookkeepers, capable of doing data entry and clerical tasks, through to high-level accounting work as undertaken by BAS agents, accountants and CFOs.
You can also see the National Bookkeeping rates page to find out what level bookkeeper your business needs.
The constant need for some companies to continue to grow revenue or subscriber numbers can make the employees do things too aggressively.
Xero has always done a great marketing job against MYOB because it was easy – all they had to do was have good software that was easier to use and in the cloud – now they’re ALL in the Cloud!
Xero focused on a cloud only model and the integrations between it and other online software programs. This was a marketing strategy that may have stretched the truth a little!
MYOB’s problem was that is WAS a Windows based software program. This made using the software harder because you had the constraints of running only on a Windows computer and had to upgrade that software regularly. It also caused issues with their Mac version and they ended up having to discontinue that software and push their Mac users straight to their Cloud version, MYOB Essentials.
I recently wrote about the Internship opportunities for selected business and office administration training courses – this work can all be done online, remotely working from home.
One of the best things about running an online training business is that we can deliver our courses to the thousands of students who live in remote parts of New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland and the rest of Australia!
Read on to discover how you can up-skill and learn how to become a remote working virtual assistant performing business and office administration work from your own home
If you are looking for and applying for junior bookkeeping jobs you can learn how to use Xero and MYOB in just a few hours with a short Bookkeeping course. Learning how to use Xero and MYOB is not hard when you work through a well designed, step-by-step series of exercises where you do the bookkeeping work.
We have lots of students who come from other industries and are attracted to bookkeeping work because it can fit into their daily routine (if they have children) and because it can be performed remotely from home.
What makes it ezy, not hard to learn Xero and MYOB
Learning how to use accounting software like Xero and MYOB is easiest when you go through practical training exercises using bookkeeping tasks that are performed doing bookkeeping work.
This is a far better way to learn than just trying to copy what you see in a video tutorial.
Bookkeeping data entry work forms the biggest number of jobs available for bookkeeping work. These jobs involve a lot of data entry to get the numbers into the software from every aspect of the business.
If all the data is entered correctly then the end of month bank reconciliation is quick and easy.
Discount Coupon Code for MYOB and Xero Courses
If you want to enrol now then make sure you check out our current promotion and use that discount coupon code to get a cheaper price for your MYOB and Xero course.
Some people might find it easier to learn the software through video tutorials, and replicating what they see on the tutorial using the software. This is a good way for experienced bookkeepers to up skill quickly on a feature that they haven’t used before. It is also a good way for beginners to lose their fear of accounting software.
Watching videos and replicating what you see is very easy to do but once you get past the 4-5th video you realise it’s not the same as performing bookkeeping tasks in an office.
Others might prefer to work through a printed manual with step by step instructions and sample data.
Combining instructor video tutorials, self-study, workbooks and case studies is best
EzyLearn Premium Xero & MYOB courses combine video tutorials which compliment and explain the tasks in the step-by-step training workbooks.
At the end of each subject an online assessment test insures you remember the important parts of each skill level. Each different Xero and MYOB course covers a very specific skill level which is aligned with the job requirements for accounting and bookkeeping jobs.
You can experiment with different methods and start with just video tutorials to see what works best for you. In my experience the MAJOR reasons that people choose video tutorials over practical exercises with case studies is
the higher cost, and
time and effort required
MYOB & Xero Training Course Contents
When you enrol into a Complete training course with EzyLearn you get the Beginners to Advanced skills and everything in between. Learn more about how much MYOB and Xero Courses cost.
Sales is an interesting thing. It involves skills which don’t seem to be well defined enough to create a qualification for – You don’t see a Diploma in Sales or a Cert IV in Sales do you?
Sales is also a topic that scares some people who feel it invovles pushing things upon people who don’t want them but that is not the case.
The most important step in the sales process is called Qualifying and it helps a sales person understand if the person they are talking to really needs what they have available for sale.
I have to admit that I do like reading Xero’s annual reports. They are just like their software, graphical and full of simple graphs and images.
Their share price took a hit recently even though their revenue and subscriptions grew and it’s because they recorded a larger loss than they have in the past. When you read through the report though you realise that they are using a new metric to measure their success.
Could be this be a way of reporting on the profitability of your own business or where you work?
In the United States most colleges have a Career Academy attached to their education services with the goal to provide extra services that help their students.
The Career Academy Addons that are available after completing an Office Admin or Bookkeeping Course with EzyLearn can be viewed here and the most popular option is to extend course access and support.
Many Xero beginners think that they only have 30 days to use the trial version of Xero but that isn’t actually correct. Xero, just like MYOB Business and QuickBooks online need you to create a “user” account and authenticate yourself using SMS or an authenticator app.
Once you’ve got your user account you are able to access dozens of different “company” files when you need to. This is how bookkeepers manage the company files for dozens of their own clients.
I’ve been getting up at 5.15am for the last 2 years – am I crazy?!
I’ve been getting up early because I work out with some friends and prefer early mornings to late nights. This means that I’m going to bed earlier and not working as much at night.
In the past I preferred to work late into the night and pushed myself to get as much work done as I possibly could. Sometimes this meant working until midnight but I noticed that the quality of the work wasn’t always the best.
The sun rises pretty early and I’d rather work with the natural light of the day than the artificial light of the night. I dug a little deeper into this and discovered that there are studies that explains how we perform at various times of the day and how that is affected by when we get up and go to bed – Circadian Rhythms.
Circadian Rhythms can affect how well you perform when studying too..
After the ludicrous events of the Covid Pandemic this era of high interest rates is squeezing everyone! Interest rates, petrol prices, energy prices and food. Have I missed anything? No, that is everything we need to live these days and prices have gone up a ridiculous amount but do you know how much your costs have gone up by?
I’ve recently taken to Microsoft Excel to perform budget calculations that I haven’t thought much about for a long time.
The most rewarding conversations I have is with EzyLearn graduates who’ve completed our courses and then gone on to manage their finances better or get an accounts job. I’ve been speaking to a lot of EzyLearn students lately and there is a consistent theme in most conversations – “what on earth is going on with the price increases for everything“.
I thought that the Covid-19 era was going to be the most challenging period because of all the disruption to our normal lives. I’m not sure if you have discovered the same but one of the best results was that more people started working from home or negotiated partial work from home arrangements with their employer.
The real disruption of The Pandemic is that we are NOW all paying the price of it with inflation and interest rates!
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Xero is a great bookkeeping program for tradies who are on the go and using their phones (or a tablet) all the time. From receipts scanning to creating quotes and invoices, receiving payments and keeping track of project costs.
bookkeepercourse.com.au/produ…