Posted on November 20, 2015 by Steve Slisar

Intermediate skills in Microsoft Word can help you create great sales letters

Microsoft Word Training Course is Being Nurtured With New Content

I recently wrote about the content in our Microsoft Word Training Courses and because its a couple years old we’ve been offering the Microsoft Word Courses as a FREE BONUS to anyone who enrolled in our Excel or MYOB courses (with certificate options). If you’re a regular reader (subscribe here) or an EzyLearn student you’d also know that we offer either 12 month or lifetime access to courses and that includes access to brand new content.

[highlight]We’re in the process of create brand new content for Microsoft Word, including training on the creation of great sales letters, resumes and tender proposals.[/highlight]

I’m happy to share with you that we’ve been working on our Word course feverishly for the last 3 months (and there is still a couple months of work to go) to make sure that we have training on the most recent version – Microsoft Word 365 (the clould-based Microsoft Word program that you can purchase on an annual subscription that costs less than the previous versions). The new Word course content is now also aimed at helping you create documents to make sales (for businesses) or find work (for job seekers).

If you’ve always wanted to improve your skills using this popular program and write documents faster, make them look more professional or take advantage of tools like Mail Merge then you’ll get some great value out of this course. We’ll be going through some exercises to help you create

A great sales letter to highlight the call-to-action for your direct marketing campaigns as well as
A resume for the job you’re looking for (and a focussed cover letter).
Proposals and tender documents to win new business for your company

Sales Letters, Resume’s, Cover Letters and Proposals

[highlight]Can you see what they all have in common? They are all marketing focussed.[/highlight]

Each of these documents are used by people EVERY day to show how professional, smart, committed and capable they are. Most companies need to write sales letters and proposals to try to win new business and maintain or increase their annual revenue. Job seekers create resumes and cover letters to convince employers that they are the best person to choose for a job vacancy.

In creating this updated Microsoft Word Course content we’ll also be working on some real life examples of creating marketing materials as part of the Small Business Marketing Courses AND our Career Academy that aims to prepare students to confidently search and apply for job vacancies.

Sales Letters for Bookkeepers and Website Designers

Bookkeepers and website designers need new clients all the time, sometimes because they just don’t have enough work but sometimes because the nature of their work is project driven so it’s [highlight]important to always be spending some time in the sales department[/highlight] (even if you are a one person band). Some people do this with content marketing, or Pay-per-click advertising on Google or Facebook, while others actively seek to meet new people and give them a reason to engage their services.

[dropcap]W[/dropcap]e’ll be working on sales letters as part of a direct marketing effort to reach potential clients and give them a [highlight]reason to act on the sales letter using a special offer and a call to action[/highlight].

You can create sales letters for your marketing campaigns using beginners skills in Microsoft Word, but when you develop the Intermediate or advanced skills you’ll find a dramatic difference in the quality of your documents.

Special Prices & BONUS Courses are for a LIMITED TIME ONLY

Are you planning on doing a Microsoft Word Course in the new year? Why not enrol now and save at least $50?

After we’ve completed all the new course content and support exercise files we’ll be bringing the Microsoft Word Course prices inline with our other course prices, so when you enrol now you can get the Word course free if you enrol into Excel or MYOB (Certification option) or you can enrol directly into Microsoft Word and get the current discounted price. Enrol now and you’ll get the benefit of the new Word course material when it’s published but you’ll get it at today’s price.

Posted on October 5, 2015May 12, 2023 by Steve Slisar — 2 Comments

What Type of Education Does The TPB Accept For Its New CPE Requirement

Type of Education for CPE Requirements of the TPB

Earlier this year, the TPB changed the requirements of the tax and BAS agent registration renewal process, now making it essential for all BAS and tax agents to participate in some form of education under its new continuing professional education (CPE) requirement.

According to the TPB, tax agents must participate in a minimum of 90 hours of CPE over the standard three year registration period, while BAS agents must participate in a minimum of 45 hours over the standard three year registration period. The Institute of Certified Bookkeepers have enabled completion of our Microsoft Excel Training Courses be accepted for CPD points.

Types of study approved by the TPB

As you’ve probably guessed, for your study to be recognised by the TPB and go towards your CPE registration requirement, the study has to relate to your area of work as a BAS or tax agent. While a short course on DIY home maintenance wouldn’t be covered, a seminar conducted by a qualified accountant who specialises in the building industry would be recognised by the TPB, even if it’s being led by a colleague at the firm where the BAS agent works.

The TPB has specified a number of activities that they consider relevant to tax advice, BAS and tax agent service you may provide:

Seminars, workshops, webinars, courses and lectures
structured conferences and discussion groups (including by phone or video conference)
tertiary courses provided by universities, registered training organisations (RTOs), other registered higher education institutions or other approved course providers
other education activities, provided by an appropriate organisation
research, writing and presentation by a registered tax (financial) adviser, tax or BAS agent of technical publications or structured training
peer review of research and writing submitted for publication or presentation in structured training
computer/internet-assisted courses, audiotape or videotape packages
attendance at structured in-house training on tax related subjects by persons or organisations with suitable qualifications and/or practical experience in the subject area covered
attendance at appropriate Australian Taxation Office (ATO) seminars and presentations
relevant CPE activities provided to members and non-members by a recognised professional association
a unit of study or other CPE activity on the Tax Agent Services Act 2009 (TASA) including the Code of Professional Conduct (Code).

If you’re a member of a recognised professional association

The second-to-last activity included in that list, you may have noticed, accepts any relevant activity provided by a recognised professional organisation. There are quite a few professional organisations recognised by the TPB, as you can see on their website, but the one probably most relevant to bookkeepers is the Institute of Certified Bookkeepers (ICB), with which EzyLearn is also a training partner.

The ICB is an association established to support bookkeepers and BAS agents by regularly holding seminars and training workshops, giving members access to marketing materials – such as customisable e-newsletter templates and unique email addresses – listings on the ICB directory and IT support, among many other things. Because they’re also accredited with the TPB and recognised by the ATO, they also possess a fair bit of influence with both organisations, making the lives of its members much easier.

In this case, being a member of the ICB, gives you access to a number of TPB-certified continuing professional education courses, seminars, lectures and workshops that can be counted as part of your CPE quota; members can also access a CPE register within the ICB dashboard to record their CPE activities.

Courses you can study as an ICB member

As a member of the ICB, you’re able to take any of the courses that they consider relevant to your profession as a bookkeeper and BAS agent, and which they consider to be continuing your professional education. This would include any of our MYOB or Xero training courses, but would also include our Excel and Word training courses as they’re both used to assist you in doing your job as a bookkeeper and BAS agent.

If you’re a BAS agent and your registration with the TPB will come due on or after July 1, 2016, you will be required to have participated in CPE to be eligible for renewal.

Joining the ICB and taking advantage of the many free and discounted seminars, workshops and courses, like one of our online training courses in MYOB, Xero, MS Excel or Word, is a good way to ensure you remain compliant with the TPB’s tax and BAS agent registration terms.

To find out more about joining the ICB, visit their website. Alternatively, if you’d like to learn more about starting your own bookkeeping business or working as a home-based bookkeeper, subscribe to our blog for all the latest news and updates delivered straight to your inbox.

Posted on August 13, 2015August 13, 2015 by Steve Slisar

How does $20,000 mortgage repayments equate to $47,598.02?

Microsoft Excel Course now includes a mortgage spreadsheet

A mortgage for your home is a huge debt, particularly for those living in the swelling capital cities with soaring house prices. The pro and cons of buying your own house and living in it are:

You don’t pay capital gains tax on a property you live in, but
You can’t claim the interest component of your loan

The big problem with this is the interest charge – you can’t claim the cost of it yet it’s a massive component of each and every payment you make on your mortgage. You’d need your house price to go up at least at the interest rate you are paying to make it a good investment – and right now you’d be doing fine (perhaps except in Perth now).

Bigger payments reduce the interest paid

Our Microsoft Excel Training Course now includes an Excel spreadsheet file that will help you see just how much money you’d save if you paid even a small amount off extra each month!

You can use the mortgage comparison file to compare two mortgages, make extra payments or even shorten the term of the loan to see how much you’d need to pay each month if you want to pay your mortgage off quicker.

If you are an existing Excel Course student you’ll find the new file at the end of our Microsoft Excel Advanced Course 309.

Take 10 years off your mortgage while its easy to

I don’t want to turn this into a financial education blog, but there are several reasons to open this spreadsheet and start seeing the resulting figures to workout the best way to allocate the money you earn. Interest rates are at record lows, house prices ‘may’ be peaking, some people say that Australian banks are so highly leveraged to the residential property market that they’ll need to hold more capital reserves.

Either way you look at it, why not use your Microsoft Excel skills and play with some calculations to see how much better off you could be if you are financially prudent now. You can also use this Microsoft Excel file to do a stress test and see how much your mortgage would be if interest rates do go up as many people expect they will.

Free Microsoft Word Course (or Xero Accounting) when you enrol in Excel Certificate Course

Note that if you enrol into Microsoft Excel Courses and choose the certificate option you’ll receive a BONUS course in either Microsoft Word (to create a professional resume) or Xero Accounting! Read our BONUS course offer announcement.

Posted on July 15, 2015July 15, 2015 by Steve Slisar

Microsoft Excel Online Training Course Includes Beginners to Advanced with LIFETIME Access

9 Microsoft Excel Training Courses from Beginners to Advanced for One Price

Most students know about us because of our online MYOB Training Courses (5 courses for the price of 1) but we have a fantastic offer for Microsoft Excel Training Courses where we include every course from Excel Beginners, Excel Intermediate and Excel Advanced for one low price.

We create our own courses so we have the perfect combination of:

Training Videos (where we use the exercise included with the course to demonstrate how to use all the features of Microsoft Excel),
Training Workbooks (where we lay out the exercises in a step-by-step approach so you can practise every new skill at your own pace and in your own time – even without internet access),
Microsoft Excel Exercise files so you can open them and see exactly how each of the Excel features work in a real life scenario
Knowledge Review Tests to make sure you remember the most important aspects of each training course and can receive a certificate of completion (if you enrol for that option)
Microsoft Excel Training Course Certificate to demonstrate the completion of your course

Worksheets, Charts and Databases

Microsoft Excel 2007 Beginners training courses and certificate Our Microsoft Excel Training Courses will teach you about ALL of these uses for Microsoft Excel and provide you with dozens of files to learn, practise and even use in your own home or business.

[quote]Charts or Graphs are visual tools that can make mundane data interesting and useful to demonstrate patterns.[/quote]

Excel charts are based on data that is entered into a worksheet but can also be produced from more advanced tools like Pivot tables.

Charts are introduced in our Microsoft Excel Beginners Courses, along with worksheets and databases and it is covered in more detail in the Intermediate Microsoft Excel Training Courses AND in the Advanced Microsoft Excel Training Courses that include pivot tables.

[box type=”tick” size=”large” style=”rounded” border=”full”]We even include the example of how we used enrolment data from 2003-2004 to find out the best time of the day and day of the week to offer our class-based Microsoft Excel Training Courses when we had our Sydney Training Centre in Dee Why.[/box]

12 Months or Lifetime Course Access

One of the fantastic things about operating an online training business is we can give students as much access as they need even LIFETIME course access. We can do this because we use a LMS (Learning Management System) called Moodle that is used by well regarded universities around the world (as well as many more humble training organisations like ours.

When we operated a class-based training centre we offered students free repeats so they could refresh their Microsoft Excel skills if they didn’t use the software for a while after their course – now we can offer unlimited access to all courses for 12 months or LIFETIME access.

No Need to Choose Between Beginners Intermediate or Advanced Excel Courses – you get them all

A skills assessment is the normal procedure a HR manager puts their employees through to understand how much their staff know and where they need to improve. It’s also the assessment that students used to go through with us over the phone when they had to decide between the different skill levels of courses (Beginners, Intermediate or Advanced), but because we include EVERYTHING in our online course there is no need to perform a skills assessment.

You can bone up on any Excel basics, reinforce your existing skills and hone some new skills because all courses are included when you enrol into Microsoft Excel with EzyLearn!

Learn more about what is included in our Microsoft Excel Course Outline and see our Enrolment page for detailed pricing and course options.

[button link=”http://ezylearnonline.com.au/courses/microsoft-excel/”]Microsoft Excel Training Courses[/button] [button link=”http://ezylearnonline.com.au/enrol/” bg_color=”#038a20″]Enrolment Prices and Options[/button]

Posted on May 20, 2015May 12, 2023 by Steve Slisar — 4 Comments

Can a Bookkeeper Give Online Marketing Advice??

Outsourced Online Content Marketing and Bookkeeping

What is Content Marketing and Does it Work?

Measurement of success of content marketing campaign

I recently wrote about content marketing and how we have used it for years to ensure our MYOB and Excel Courses appear in Google’s organic search results. I touched on the topic of “who is your audience”, why it’s important and how it may affect your writing style – in reality you just need to write like you are sending an email to a friend, don’t you think – but one of the most important things is to measure the results of your work.

We started using WordPress as our website development platform because it’s relatively easy to use, but mainly because millions of people use it around the world and there are LOT’s of great tools within the platform. These tools are called plugins and they enable any business owner to take control of their website and improve it bit by bit every week or month.

WordPress is like the Microsoft Word of content management systems (CMS) and enables all of the functionality that most people want to see in a professional website, including the capability of enabling a mobile friendly site (important with the new changes in Google for mobile optimised websites).

If you are starting a content marketing strategy I recommend you work at your website every week or two, writing great new content that is relevant to your customers and prospects.

The above chart demonstrates the success we had helping one company improve their organic rankings (in a pretty competitive market). All they did is kept adding relevant text and images to their website that helps website visitors find them and answer their questions.

Want To Learn How To Do This?

Can anyone do this? Yes they can. Like most things there is a formula to success and it takes constant work and regular improvement. I’ve teamed up with a content writer and a digital strategist (could you imagine seeing that job description even 15 years ago?!), to create a course designed to help you learn how to plan and execute a content marketing strategy.

Can a Bookkeeper Do Content Marketing?

I was speaking with Ray from the Startup Academy and we were talking about what makes a good bookkeeper. He mentioned a conversation he had with an experienced bookkeeper he knows who has been bookkeeping for quite a few years and she mentioned that her focus is changing, that she is now starting to spend time on all sorts of aspects of the finance and administration of the businesses she works for. Because of her knowledge and experience she is able to take over many of the other “operational and administration” aspects of her clients businesses and as a result she can:

Do more work for fewer clients (easier to manage, yet still spreads her risk between several clients)
Perform more varied tasks for her small business clients
Earn a higher rate of pay

Can a Bookkeeper Become a Small Business Manager?

Have you read about our relatively new initiative to help people start their own bookkeeping business? One of the training courses we include is the small business management course and we’ve included it because it helps you clearly define the operational aspects of your business plan. Things like

how many customers do you want,
how much do you want to charge,
what type of work do you want to do etc.

Although there are fairly standard rates that bookkeeper charge for bookkeeping work, these rates can increase if your skill base is broader and you can become more valuable to your clients.

I read a recent article in the Sydney Morning Herald (from Feb 27, 2015, by Alexandra Cain) where she talks about the number of bookkeepers there are in Australia (estimated to be 250,000) compared to the number of bookkeepers who are registered with the Tax Practitioners Board as How to become a Registered BAS Agent (12,000). Alexandra introduces the topic of what type of work bookkeepers do and it’s highly practical for them to venture into many other parts of the business.

Every Course To Be Included in National Bookkeeping Package

Start a bookkeeping business not a franchise

This is the news that I have been waiting to announce – that we will be including ALL of our courses and any future courses to people who join our new bookkeeping business opportunity, National Bookkeeping. New members will receive thousands of dollars worth of training courses in EVERY course we have so they’ll have knowledge (and access to a knowledge base) about

Marketing,
Website design, Blogging and Internet Marketing
Content marketing, plus using Microsoft Office Applications like,
Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint etc

We have courses on using help desk software like ZenDesk (that we use), Dropbox and stacks of other short online courses, PLUS we’ll be creating new ones during the year (and the next and the next) that National Bookkeeping Licensee will have access to.

If you are interested in exploring this opportunity further, feel free to go through the Bookkeeping Business Opportunity FAQ’s or make contact with us for more information.

Posted on February 22, 2015 by Steve Slisar

Beginners to Advanced Microsoft Excel Course for $197 inc Exercise Files

$197 Beginners to Advanced Microsoft Excel Course includes Exercise Files

One of the best ways of learning how to use a program is to use that program during your training. Some people can sit with programs like Microsoft Excel and learn by trying something out and making mistakes and then trying again.

[box type=”tick”]We’ve discovered that Microsoft Excel course students want to work with real world files in a logical step-by-step method that uses the exercise files for the basic skills and then keep using that file for the more advanced skills.[/box]

By the end you’ll have a powerful Microsoft Excel spreadsheet using advanced skills and because you learnt in a logical and methodical way, using gradually more complicated tools, you’ll have learnt most of the Microsoft Excel skills you’ve wanted and won’t even notice the time go by.

Real World Use of Microsoft Excel Spreadsheets

The main uses for Microsoft Excel are as a:

Worksheet that enables you to lay out information in a logical fashion and then perform calculations with that data
Database that lists all of the information in a tabular format that can then be filtered and manipulated into a format that can be used in mail merges etc, and
Charts and graphs that visually present the information in a worksheet or table so that we humans can make sense of the information

Here are some of the ways that we use Microsoft Excel for our training business.

Present information for use in newspaper ads

In Microsoft Excel Course 303 we look at formulas and formatting and one exercise file we share with students and an example of what’s possible using Excel is the artwork we created for the newspaper ads for our courses at our training centres in Sydney. The table structure of Excel enables us to lay the information out precisely and if we need to change the dates

What costs us the most money

Yes, you can see the costs of running a business in a simple table, but when you put it in a chart you can visually see the differences in costs and in our 305 course on charting we’ll show you how to create the various different types of pie, line and bar charts as well as many other types. You’ll learn how to format the charts to make certain areas stand out and you’ll learn how to demonstrate trends.

Budgets and forecasting

It’s great when you have historical information to work with because you can spend a lot of time working out percentages, margins, budgets etc to try to figure out how you will go in the future. We include many exercise files in Microsoft Excel Course 306, including files to help you:

Maintain a household (or business budget)
Calculate sales margins and commissions for sales people (we have several different versions of this file to demonstrate how the file should look at the various stages of creating it).
Create a price list (including all wholesale product costings – that will be hidden from view)

Making the right decisions

When we operated our training centres in Sydney we spent a lot of our time scheduling courses. We had to allocate training rooms, roster on our great trainers, print training materials and we needed to know when people where coming to courses. We discovered that most people who wanted to learn Microsoft Excel did a night class. We had these variables to work with:

The courses
What days people had come to these courses in the past
The time of the day that students had enrolled into these courses: morning, midday, evening or weekend.
Different training methods (class-based and Flexible Learning)

By discovering the best days and times that students had enrolled into courses from the past we were able to better schedule our courses to get the most students. It means we didn’t need to cancel courses.

See the contents of Microsoft Excel Course 308 for more information.

Figure out how to make more profit

In a business you can build a bigger business and make more profit by

increasing sales,
cutting costs,
focussing on your most profitable customers,
focussing on your most profitable products,
decreasing the time it takes to get your money (cash sale or terms).

Using Goal Seek in Microsoft Excel we discovered something that’ll help all independent contractors run a better more profitable business.

Posted on January 5, 2015December 23, 2014 by Steve Slisar

Did I Mention a Free Excel Beginners Course?

Free Excel Beginners Course

I recently wrote about our Microsoft Excel [link] Training Courses and how they have the features that make all of our online training courses popular, but I forgot to mention that we make the Excel Beginners Course available for free. These free training videos AND Excel Course workbook will give you the confidence to understand the main uses for Microsoft Excel.

Microsoft Excel can be used for lots of different things, but the main uses are:

Worksheet (to do calculations)
Chart (to visually show the data)
Database (to store data)

Our Excel Beginners Course videos will give you the basic Microsoft Excel knowledge very quickly, but the Excel Beginners Course workbook and exercise files will give you the chance to replicate what you see in the videos and LEARN BY DOING. You’ll get the training workbook to print out and we’ll also send you the excel files that we use in our demonstrations.

Excel Intermediate to Advanced Courses

Don’t worry, once you master the basics you’ll either want to know as much as you can about Microsoft Excel or decide that you’ll just use the software when you need it. Either way, with our LIFETIME course access option you can complete and repeat the course as often as you want and with all skills levels (from Beginners to Advanced Excel) you’ll be covered.

We’ve been teaching people how to use Microsoft Excel since we started at Lane Cove in Sydney in 1996 and we look forward to helping more people learn Excel to become more productive, more employable and more successful.

Make sure you share our free Excel Beginners Courses with your friends on social media.

[button link=”http://ezylearnonline.com.au/courses/microsoft-excel/free-microsoft-excel-beginners-course-training-videos/”]FREE Excel Beginners Course[/button] [button link=”http://ezylearnonline.com.au/enrol/” bg_color=”#99050c”]Enrol Now[/button]

Posted on December 29, 2014December 23, 2014 by Steve Slisar

Forecast a Positive Future Using Microsoft Excel

Time to Reflect, Thank and Plan

sales-forecasting-using-microsoft-excel-training-course We had our office Christmas party (for our Sydney team) this week and I went through and individually thanked each of my team for their contribution during the year. I’m very lucky to be working with a great bunch of people – although, you know what they say:”The harder I work the luckier I get” – and I used our Christmas lunch to thank each of them publicly (in front of their peers) for their efforts because I think it’s important.

We started a lot of diverse and interesting projects during the year and they include:

Assembling a course to teach people how to create their own course – ideal for sites that want to create their own online Inductions for contractors,
Worked with the Australian Small Business Centre to create new sales and marketing courses for their Business Management Course.
Created a MYOB Bookkeeper Directory to help our students start their own bookkeeping business and find new clients
Established the StartUp Academy to help ordinary people start their own business working from home

Treat Yourself as you Plan for Success in 2015

Sales forecasting using Microsoft Excel Training Courses and MYOB Data One of our team members said she’s going on holidays and really needs the time off because she will be studying VERY hard next year. She’ll have 5 weeks off and she’s 21. I started to wonder if I am a workaholic, am a little twisted in my opinion of what makes a good holiday or that I just love what I am doing, but I offered to give her work to do while she was on holidays overseas for that long period of time – after all, isn’t it great to earn some money working from your computer, using the internet for a couple hours each day and then getting into the festivities!?

I was thinking about my ideal holiday – work a couple hours every morning (early if possible so no one is awake to distract me), then feel rewarded and REALLY enjoy the rest of the day and night. It gives me the feeling of still being connected to the world at home, while achieving something workwise and then cutting off completely from work for the rest of the day.

When I think about the festive season and the quiet time between Christmas and when most people come back to work (5th January 2015 or later) I see an opportunity to stay in Sydney where it almost becomes a pleasure to drive on the roads and spend the time in thought and contemplation to plan for the coming year. It’s usually the time when I write down my major goals for the coming year and start to clearly define them, how they’ll look and operate and what is needed to achieve them. It’s the time when I end up getting on my computer and powering up Microsoft Excel to do those once a year checks on the past and forecasts for the future.

Microsoft Excel Course for Financial Forecasting

Export Sales Report information from MYOB AccountRight to Microsoft Excel

Forecasts are those interesting things that investments are based on. Someone with a spreadsheet and a business plan will guess how much they’ll earn in the forthcoming year/quarter/month etc and back it up with all their evidence in the business plan. To many people it’s a waste of time because “who can really predict the future”, but to those people who do it it’s a way of crystalising your plans into monthly or quarterly objectives that are based on the past (in most cases) and on intelligent estimates of what the market needs.

Export Your MYOB Reports

If you already use MYOB Accounting Software to manage your bookkeeping and accounts you can easily export a report about last periods sales and use that as a basis for next years forecasts. Many slight changes can result in more sales and higher profits in 2015, including:

new products,
expanded services or
price increases

But your decision to no longer provide 30 days credit terms or be more diligent with late payers can help you earn your money twice as fast. Either way you do it, now is a great time to export that data from MYOB, or Xero or Quickbooks and get it into a spreadsheet (worksheet) so you can start to do some mathematics to show how much more you’ll earn in 2015.

Online Microsoft Excel Training Courses

If you’ve followed our blog posts you’d know that we have a very popular MYOB training course. I wanted you to know that we have a popular Excel Training Course too and it comes with the same benefits as most of our online courses:

12 months or LIFETIME Excel Course access
Assessment and Certificate Option
Includes 9 skill levels from Excel Beginners to Advanced
Includes exercise files to practice
Includes multiple version of the Microsoft Excel Software
Each of the 9 courses includes an Excel Training Workbook with step-by-step exercises
Comes with a 30 day money back guarantee

Posted on June 12, 2014June 11, 2014 by Steve Slisar

The EzyLearn MYOB Course Community

At EzyLearn we offer a handful of online training courses: Microsoft Office (Excel, Word, PowerPoint and Outlook), MYOB Accounting, and WordPress website design and blogging. There are many companies who promote courses online and that’s just what they do — promote courses online — but we try to be a little different.

Here’s why:

We offer only a handful of courses and we do them very well
Our courses come with LIFETIME Membership
As a student you receive fresh, new content without paying extra
Where possible, we provide real life exercise files so you can work with the software.

Our Online Community

Our experience with thousands of students has taught us that some students need more interaction than just the videos. They also like to bounce off other people to better understand the software they are learning.

That’s why we provide our Student Community and Tutor Support — to provide our students with the ability to communicate with fellow students, as well as ask questions of our experienced community moderators. It’s like having your own tutor that you can ask questions to who can provide quality answers based on their own experience in their relative industries.

Our students range from job seekers to small business owners and existing bookkeepers wanting to learn more, to accountants who may be thinking of leaving the corporate world and setting up a small business for themselves (or even seeking greater work-life balance).

Qualified Moderators

Our student support community is moderated by our MYOB Bookkeeper and Registered BAS agent, giving students the benefit of both communication with other course attendees (to socialise and to learn) as well as obtain answers to specific questions.

Annual Membership

Our Student Community and Tutor Support is provided on a yearly membership basis and you can continue or opt-out as you please each year. The service is available to existing EzyLearn students or new students enrolling into any one of our courses.

Posted on April 28, 2014April 23, 2014 by Steve Slisar

Feedback from Students About Our Online Training Courses

We value - and need - your feedback about our online training courses. — We value – and need – your feedback about our online training courses.

Over the years, we’ve provided online training to numerous Australian – and international – students, whether via our flagship MYOB training course or one of our Excel or WordPress courses, or our more recent Small Business Management Course. Over the years these students have provided us with valuable feedback.

The feedback we receive from our students helps us to understand what’s working and what isn’t, which is why it’s invaluable to us that you get in touch and let us know what you think.

It was based on the feedback we received from our students that we decided to develop our Reach Accounting and Xero training courses. It is also based on the feedback we received that we changed the way we issued our certificates so that students received them faster and could use them to find work.

Recent Feedback

Here’s just some of the feedback we’ve received from our students recently:

“I found the workbooks the most helpful for giving practical experience.” — Karen Dimitri, Glengowrie SA 5044

“The best part is that you can do it on your own time and pace.” — Juliana van Wyk, Hilton WA 6163

“Short, easily digestable videos. Can fit in easily with a busy lifestyle.” — Korina Power, North Shore, Auckland 0630

“I could learn at my own pace.” — Jackie Smith, Sheidow Park, SA 5158

“Doing the workbooks and watching the videos at my own pace has helped me a lot in pursing the current workforce requirements.” — Merritt Ray, Loganholme QLD 4129

“I was able to finish the whole course in just a couple of weeks.” — YoonOck Lee, Atwell, WA 6164

“By watching videos on one particular topic and doing a test straight after relating to those videos, you don’t become too overwhelmed with too much information.” — Michelle Bankstown, NSW 2200

“I am happy as I could completely the course at my own pace. It was easy n simple to understand. As a mother I felt the course was very time efficient. Looking forward to putting my knowledge into action.” — Kimberline Francis, St James, WA 6102

“This course is best for me because I can access any time from home, I can replay any video provided when I didn’t understand.” — Mika Humphreys, Innisfail, QLD 4860

“Everything within the course itself was great. I liked the most how easy it was to understand and navigate through.” — Katie Davis, Whyalla, SA 5608

“Being able to actually move around the sample company file to get a feeling of how the software is structured, made me have more confident.” — Joy Khoo, Mudgee, NSW 2850

“The best parts of this course is that we get freedom to learn and complete this course in your own suitable time. There is not so much pressure that you have to complete in certain time limit. I would advise and recommend this course from EzyLearn to international students who want to further their career in bookkeeping and accounting. It was a great privilege to be part of your institute.” — Prabin Gurung, Auburn, NSW 2144

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We’d love to hear from you too. Get in touch via our course evaluation page.

Posted on August 19, 2013August 16, 2013 by Angela

What’s New in MS Office 2013? Here’s a Quick List

Frequent updates and infrequent use of software like Excel can really leave you stumped - that's where Lifetime Membership comes in real handy! — Frequent updates and infrequent use of software like Excel can really leave you stumped – that’s where Lifetime Membership comes in real handy!

At EzyLearn we offer online training courses for MYOB — the #1 Cloud-accounting software — but did you know we also offer training in Microsoft Excel and Word?

Just as we do with our MYOB training courses, we also offer Lifetime access to our MS Excel and Word training courses, which means each time Microsoft releases a new version of MS Office, we update our course content so you’re always totally up to date with the latest versions of Word and Excel.

Keeping Excel in Your Memory

Let’s be straight up here; once you get the hang of Word you probably won’t need to refer back to our course content all that much. Excel, on the other hand, is a different ball game.

In many ways Excel is a lot like algebra or a foreign language: if you don’t use it often, you’ll forget it. Sure, you’ll remember bits — J’adore Dior! E = mc2! — but you’re likely to struggle through your day-to-day if it’s something you rely on heavily at work.

Because many people use accounting software like MYOB, their use of Excel is fairly infrequent. For instance, suddenly trying to create a PivotTable will probably leave most of us stumped! And let’s not forget that by the time most users have mastered how to create macros in their worksheets, Microsoft will have released a new version of MS Office and we’ll be back to square one again. This, in large part, is a key reason why we offer Lifetime access to our training courses— because we, just like you, also forget stuff.

New Features in New MS Word and Excel (in a Nutshell)

Now that Microsoft has released their highly anticipated MS Office 2013, it’s likely you won’t be able to find the ‘Paste Special’ button again, so we’re updating our course content to reflect the new changes.

Here’s a low-down on some of the new features in the new MS Word and Excel:

Word:

Open and edit PDF files in Word – finally! Gone are the days of having an additional piece of software installed on your PC to enable this.
Threaded review comments
Read mode with page turning
Alignment guides – hallelujah! Why have they never had this before!
Placeholder

Excel:

Quick analysis
Flash fill – we’ve always had this to an extent, but flash fill just got a whole lot more intelligent!
PowerView – for the real Excel pro, but still a welcome addition.
New PivotTable tools
Improved functionality when opening new Excel windows
Recommended PivotTables and charts
New chart controls
Get a link
Publish Excel data to social media – we don’t recommend using this often, because snore. But it’s still great if you want to quickly share your yoy sales results with your Twitter followers or Facebook friends.

So whether you’re using MS Office 2013, 2010 or prior, if you’ve forgotten how to do a VLOOKUP, it’s time you educated yourself in the mystery that is Excel — enrol in one of our Microsoft training courses today!

Posted on July 31, 2013March 26, 2020 by Steve Slisar — 5 Comments

Be Happy: Start a Business and Work From Home

You may find that one of the key benefits of starting your own business is that your work actually makes you much happier.

Are you toying with the idea of starting a virtual or home-based business? Well EzyLearn is your one-stop training-shop for everything you need to start a business — all via our Small Business Management training course, MYOB training courses, WordPress training courses and MS Office training courses.

But what are the real benefits of working from home? Continue reading Be Happy: Start a Business and Work From Home

Posted on December 3, 2012December 4, 2012 by Steve Slisar — 1 Comment

What is Teleworking?

In a nutshell, teleworking is the ability for employees to work remotely, usually from a home office, rather than travelling to the workplace. And it’s something that Australia, and indeed, the rest of the world has been moving towards for some time.

If you think about it, ever since the widespread adoption of email, the wheels have been in motion for an era where people could opt to work from home rather than commuting to the workplace every day.

For a while, though, it has been a bit of a logistical nightmare. If you’ve ever tried to work remotely before, then chances are, at some point you’ve uttered one or all of these complaints: “This file is too large for me to email”, [quote]I don’t have that software installed on my home PC[/quote] or “My Internet’s really slow. I might as well just come into the office”.

But when you throw things like broadband Internet, laptops, tablet devices, smart phones and the latest little life-saver, cloud accounting and storage software (like Dropbox) into the mix, working remotely, or teleworking, slowly but surely got easier.

The benefits of teleworking to employees and employers, plus also to the Australian government are huge, which is why the Australian government spearheaded the move to a National Broadband Network (NBN), which, when rollout is complete, will see high-speed Internet cabled into nearly every Australian home (93%).

The NBN will give you the freedom to things like enrol in distance education or complete one of our MYOB courses, work from home, or even start a home-based business without having to worry about poor or unreliable internet coverage.

Teleworking is the future of all Australian workplaces – you can learn about the benefits of teleworking here.

Posted on November 11, 2012April 12, 2017 by Steve Slisar

Online MYOB Courses with a 30-Day Money-Back Guarantee

Full Money-Back Guarantee

IF YOU’RE FAMILIAR WITH our online MYOB courses you might recall that we offer a money-back guarantee. We’ve always offered this guarantee because online training is still a relatively new phenomenon for many students. Perhaps these students would still prefer some one-to-one, personal attention from a tutor in a class-based training course.

Our original money-back guarantee was for 7 days, but after speaking with a handful of new students they seemed anxious that they didn’t have enough time to get around the course to see if it’s right for them. Some of our fastest students manage to get through the entire course within 5 days, most people get through it in 2-3 weeks, but regardless of how fast or slow you learn, all new students have the 30 day money-back guarantee.

We also offer the 30-day money back guarantee because we think we offer the most comprehensive MYOB courses available in Australia. Our online MYOB training includes:

5 MYOB courses (Set Up to Payroll)
7 training workbooks (some MYOB courses have 2 workbooks)
7 different case studies (each workbook takes you through another example of how MYOB accounting software is used)
Over 250 training videos
Several MYOB versions (version 15 to 19, as well as the latest version 2012)
Knowledge Reviews to test your skills regularly throughout the course
12 month’s or Lifetime Access so you can use the MYOB courses as an ongoing resource.
FREE student membership to the Institute of Certified Bookkeepers (ICB)

Our MYOB courses will give you confidence whether you:

are applying for a job that requires MYOB
want to be more useful in your current job OR
want to start (or better manage) your own small business

Our new 30-day money-back guarantee shows how confident we are in the value of our online training courses. Find out more about our MYOB training courses. Enrol today and start by 5pm next business day.

online bookkeeping courses to earn cpd points

EzyLearn Excel, MYOB and Xero online training courses count towards Continuing Professional Development (CPD) for bookkeepers and accountants. We’ve been an accredited training provider of the Institute of Certified Bookkeepers ever since the organisation started in Australia. Find out how CPD points can be of benefit to you.

Posted on September 26, 2012October 12, 2012 by Steve Slisar — 4 Comments

Satisfaction Statistics for online MYOB Training Courses

Our offer and your satisfaction

We strive for an innovative training experience for our Microsoft Excel and MYOB training courses by providing:

Beginners to advanced software training skills for one price so you don’t have to agonise over which course to choose for your current skill level
Lifetime access to course resources including updates
Variety of learning tools including training videos, workbooks with exercises, exercise files and knowledge reviews

As a result it is important for us to develop training materials that are easy to use and self explanatory so that our students learn quickly and we don’t need to provide too much support. We need to ensure that any problem a student faces is dealt with so that future students are guided more smoothly through their learning experience.

Sometimes it’s the software

I wrote in a recent blog about the significant changes that MYOB are going through with their software and how it affects not only our students but real, live businesses that use MYOB software in day-to-day operations. We’ve experienced this most recently in our MYOB bank reconciliation course where we exported the accounts list and journal entries from a previous version of MYOB so that students can easily import them into the current version. This worked very well for all the previous versions until MYOB started developed their current versions using the Microsoft .NET platform.

After going through several scenarios about how to improve the flow of our course and scouting MYOB’s support communities we’ve discovered that importing from previous versions to the current version is a little more difficult than it use to be. Students will just need to create the data manually and this isn’t a major problem, but it highlights some of the issues that are faced in the real world anyway.

But what can we do?

To handle our growing number of student members (and we call you members because you have lifetime access to the course materials including the new updates) we implemented a powerful customer support system called Zendesk, a system that is used by over 20000 companies world-wide including Twitter, msnbc.com, Denver Broncos, Lonely Planet, and SAP. We also turned on the satisfaction ratings which scared us at first because we would truly see how well we are doing according to our students. The result? 90% Customer satisfaction – that’s a high distinction I believe.

Why write a blog post about it?

tim tams and coffee at Sydney training centre — Source: http://annychih.com/the-best-job-in-the-world/testing-out-tim-tams/

There are several aspects to learning that most people are used to:

Training that is easy to follow and easy to duplicate so you can do it yourself
Training material to answer most of your questions
The social experience of meeting other people and sharing stories during the coffee break

Sadly, online training can’t provide the thousands of personal experiences our trainers experienced with their students during the coffee breaks, while eating Tim Tams. It’s this human contact element that we can’t replicate online so we closely watch the satisfaction ratings for the answers and support that our team provide to students when they have questions or difficulties.

We can’t replicate the coffee and Tim Tams online, but we can implement leading support tools and find great team members so we maintain a high distinction in support.

Posted on August 20, 2012 by Steve Slisar

Congratulations to our new MYOB Bookkeeper graduates

Our most recent MYOB Bookkeeper Training and Microsoft Excel Course graduates have just received their certificates and going through the records it was fantastic to see how many people we are able to help from all over Australia.

When we operated our Sydney training centres in Dee Why (near Brookvale), Gordon (near Chatswood), Parramatta and Burwood we noticed that students would travel a long way to come to our training centres. I won’t even get started about how they would have to try to find somewhere to park, with parking time limits etc etc.

In looking at our recent graduates it gives me a great feeling to know that we are teaching people all over Australia and New Zealand to use MYOB to help them find bookkeeping/accounting jobs or starting their own bookkeeping businesses. Here’s where some of our recent students live and what they said about the course:

Samantha from Agaston, South Australia

Agaston is near Nurioopta, Williamstown and Gawler

The fact that I could start and continue the course when I had the time. It was easy to understand and use.

Wendy from Surry Hills (Sydney), New South Wales

Surry Hills is near Paddington, Alexandria and Haymarket

I can study at my own time

Beverly from Butler, Western Australia

Butler is very North Perth, near Joondalup

Being able to learn at my own pace online.

Geoff from Epping, Victoria

Epping is surrounded by Bundoora, Campbellfield and Craigieburn

Learning more about short cuts and the really powerful nature and depth available in Excel, particularly in Course 303, was most enlightening and beneficial.
Really appreciate the learning at your own pace aspect and the lifetime course and excellent material content. Thank you so much for such an excellent course presented at an affordable price.

Anne-Maree from Sippy Downs, Queensland

Sippy Downs is near Buderim, Mooloolaba, Maroochydore and Caloundra, north of Brisbane

Nice short videos so you could take breaks and it wasn’t hard to find a certain video if you had to look back over something

Rebecca from Wodonga, Victoria

Wodonga is near Albury on the NSW and Victoria border

Easy to navigate around the site. I liked the short video presentations. If I was interuppted for whatever reason, you never missed too much and it was easy enough to replay.

Carmen from Ruse, New South Wales

Ruse is south west of Sydney, past Prestons and near Campbelltown and Narellan

The sort videos, easy to process and understand the information when presented this way.