There’s lots to do when businesses engage a new worker. As an employer, you’ll be busy going through the onboarding process and showing your new employee the ropes, but there are other important things to do when you add a new member to your team.
Keeping accurate records complete with the right information is essential for businesses to maintain, and that means updating and adding data when engaging a new worker. Here are some things to keep in mind as you go through this process:
This Xero course is the most popular with job seekers and business owners because it gives them the training they need to do almost anything using Xero. These are the course topics:
The Complete Xero Course takes most students 3-4 weeks to complete but you can learn it at your own pace and in your own time.
12 months or LIFETIME access – your choice
Enrol at our original enrolment website and you can learn everything about Bookkeeping using Xero with LIFETIME course access.
This includes all additional content we create and updates to training material. It also includes access to EzyLearn ANSWERS!
If you want the cheaper option you can enrol into the course here with 12 months course access and support.
Join us as a Tutor
If you have industry experience AND you complete our courses you can also become an EzyLearn Tutor.
As an EzyLearn TUTOR you become our partner and work part time, while also earning an income online as our affiliate – this is just one of our Career Academy membership options for students.
Enquire with us today and get the FREE Xero course sample – as well as Microsoft Office and Word training!
Frequently Asked Questions and Answers
If you have any other questions you’ll find answers to most of them at our FAQ’s.
Here are just some of the most common questions and links to their answers.
There are many finance professionals — who does your business need?
Does your business need a bookkeeper, accountant or perhaps just a BAS agent – or a little bit of everyone?
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.
Many students who work in industries like childcare, aged care and home services 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.
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 involves 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..
Amelia and her husband run a landscape construction business in Melbournes Eastern suburbs called Whitaker Landscape Constructions. She enrolled into a Xero Training Course with EzyLearn while doing a Cert IV in Bookkeeping and Accounting at Chisholm because she wanted more practical skills using accounting software.
What she discovered was how detailed and in-depth EzyLearn training courses and workbooks really are. OK, that’s enough of the boasting – here are some things Amelia said she likes about using Xero in her husband’s business.
Yes, it’s true! You can get Xero Certification for FREE directly from Xero. Xero offer two free Certifications:
Xero Certified Advisor, and
Xero Payroll Certification
We had a course inquiry from someone who had already done this certification and they raved about Xero and what it can do and how it works – BUT THEY HAD NEVER USED XERO!
Gina has 10 years experience in every aspect of operating and managing a tourist and caravan park in her home state of Tasmania and she loved the bookkeeping side of the work so much she wants to do it for other businesses.
She learnt how to use Xero and loves how it means she can do the work from anywhere – even Zeehan in Tasmania’s west.
Branding themes are just a fancy word for templates and you can create as many as you need in Xero. The biggest reasons to use different branding themes is if you use different payment methods or you have different brands within the business.
A major benefit when using branding themes is you can allocate a different theme for selected customers. For example if you have a set of customers that allow you to deduct payment for their invoices using a service uCollect you can allocate a branding theme in Xero that doesn’t give them the option to pay that invoice but instead shows a message for them NOT to pay and that the payment will be made automatically.
A Cert IV in Bookkeeping and Accounting is the same as any other Cert IV in Bookkeeping and Accounting, right? Wrong.
One of the biggest issues that ex Mentor Education students face in trying to transfer their credits to another training organisation AND continuing their studies is that EVERY RTO can choose some of their own subjects.
So a Cert IV in Bookkeeping can be different from one RTO and TAFE to another even though they’re the same qualification – does that makes sense. Let me demonstrate.
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EzyLearn's Career Academy
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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…
