ONLINE TRAINING IS one of the most convenient ways for busy people to study. While some people take to it naturally, for others the flexibility and freedom it affords itself is a learning curve.
The key to successful online training, however, is family support and we’ve noticed that many students for our Xero & MYOB Courses are parents who are stretched for time.
Continue reading Does Your Family Support Your Study?
I was speaking with someone who just landed a part-time job, in-fact a contract position, even though the job was advertised as a full-time job.
The job seeker was telling me about the advanced new features of Australia’s leading job board, including:
Xero is complicated, let’s be honest. I know that Xero tell you the software is beautiful and simple to use but in reality it’s accounting software and if accounting software was easy then everyone would have their BAS’s lodged on time and have no credit risk issues.
It also depends on what kind of past experience you’ve had with accounting and bookkeeping work, but there is a way to up-skill in Xero quickly.
We’ve previously blogged about how QuickBooks accounting compares with MYOB. We’ve also done a comparison of all three accounting programs — MYOB, Xero and QuickBooks.
In doing so, it’s interesting to note that QuickBooks, for small business owners, at least, was the clear winner against MYOB in terms of reporting and user experience. But how does QuickBooks stack up against the increasingly-popular Xero? You may be surprised at the results.
WHEN RUNNING YOUR business, is most of the contact you have with your customers via your mobile phone?
In late 2017 I was involved in a renovation of a Newcastle investment property. During this, I came in direct contact with many tradespeople including:
— and one thing really stood out: the way they all seemed to live and breath via their mobile phones but rarely get onto a computer!
This Xero Accounting and PayPal training workbook is our free gift to you. It’s designed for all tradespeople — and anyone else — who does the bulk of their work (and their pricing) ‘out and about’.
It’s designed to help people who just want to get the financial aspect of their work sorted out — so they can get back to doing what they do best. In the case of these tradies, it was doing a great job on the tools.
Continue reading FREE Xero Accounting & PayPal Training Workbook
As mentioned in an earlier post, job boards offer the best-quality jobs for people in professions that translate to any industry; and this includes bookkeeping and accounting jobs.
And as another post showed, there’s a vast number of bookkeeping jobs posted to those sites every day, be it for casual, part-time or full time work. In this post I’m going to explore some ways to do well in the job market. Continue reading I’m a Bookkeeper – How Do I Find Good Work?
GONE ARE THE DAYS when a bookkeeper only needed to know their way around MYOB. Since the internet democratised the accounting software market, abundant MYOB rivals have appeared.
But while there are close to a dozen cloud accounting systems on the market, most bookkeepers — thankfully — will only need to know their way around three: Xero, MYOB and QuickBooks. If you’re looking for a course or training resource on these programs we have a combo offer.
Continue reading Bookkeepers Need to Know All Cloud-Accounting Systems
EZYLEARN HAS PARTNERED with a registered training organisation (RTO) to provide Cert IV in Bookkeeping!
However, previous to this we have consciously made the decision NOT to become a Registered Training Organisation because it was surplus to our needs. In other words, not being an RTO has never stopped us helping thousands of students go through our Bookkeeping Courses — as well as Microsoft Office and Marketing Courses — and focussing on creating great learning journeys using real world scenarios.
Continue reading ANNOUNCEMENT: Cert IV in Bookkeeping and Accounting with Bookkeeping Academy Membership **Limited Time Only**
The Internet has spawned several cloud accounting software program all over the world including:
Continue reading SPECIAL OFFER: MYOB, Xero & QuickBooks Online Courses ALL for One Low Price
ERPs, or Enterprise Reporting Planning systems, are divided into three categories or tiers. Xero, MYOB, QuickBooks and other cloud accounting software used by small businesses, sit at the low end of the scale; they’re tier three ERPs.
Xero is using it’s 3rd party app integrations and its API to climb up the ERP food chain and some good bookkeepers are being dragged up along with it.
Continue reading Xero, MYOB, ERPs and Supply Chain Tools
I HAD THE PLEASURE of being invited to meet with some fabulous registered BAS agents at a recent function for VIP’s before this week’s QuickBooks Connect Conference in Sydney’s Intuit head office.
The VIP event included presentations from lots of App developers who provide Bookkeeping and Accounting Apps which integrate with QuickBooks Online (and also Xero and MYOB) as well as practice and workflow management systems like Practice Ignition and HubDoc which help bookkeeper’s assist their clients.
These BAS agents have been bookkeepers for decades, yet rather than sit on their past practices, they are constantly learning and improving their knowledge of software, systems and apps and talking to them about this new technology seemed very natural. This actually surprised me because I thought I was the only one who was right into this stuff — well, not the only one, but I can get very passionate about it! But I digress.
Continue reading QuickBooks Connect VIP Event & One-to-One Bookkeeping Training
When I made the decision to convert EzyLearn from a Bricks and Mortar training centre to an online only provider of training courses I realised that we were going to have to get good at:
EzyLearn has been in business helping job seekers, business owners, managers and clients of rehabilitation providers learn how to use software for over 20 years. Read our story here..
I’m lucky today to have a professional team who’s sole focus is on getting better at all of these tasks – every week! I guess this post is as much a thank you to all of them for their help as it is an announcement that ALL of our XERO courses have recently been updated!
Beginners and Advanced Xero Training Course updatesAlmost every course has been touched in our latest updates but here is a summary:
One reason that students choose EzyLearn for their online training courses is because they receive access to new added content and course updates.
The usual time to finish the COMPLETE set of Beginners to Advanced Xero Courses is 3 weeks but one of the reasons we offer 12 months course access (and the LIFETIME Xero Course Access) is so that students can go back and review the contents when they need it in their business or job.
Get all the Xero Course details at our FAQ’s.
If you’re interested in enrolling into a Xero course take a look at the current special offers and subscribe to our Discount Voucher program to receive the discount codes.
LAST WEEK, MYOB LAUNCHED a beta trial of its single touch payroll (STP) product, as it gears up for the July 1, 2018 compliance deadline.
Businesses with 20 or more employees need to have transitioned to the ATO’s Single Touch Payroll initiative by July.
Businesses with fewer than 20 employees have until July 1, 2019 to be compliant but for these small business owners and contractors the ATO has a new free app. Continue reading MYOB Launches Single Touch Payroll Trial Product
XERO HAS BECOME ONE of the major accounting software players in Australia. Like the other two major cloud accounting programs, Xero offers a partner program (officially, the Xero Partner Program), in which bookkeepers and accountants “partner” with Xero to exclusively offer Xero-based bookkeeping and accounting services to clients. Continue reading Is Xero’s Partner Program Really Affiliate Marketing?
NOT SO LONG AGO, bookkeepers and accountants only had to learn to work with one accounting program. That was back when MYOB, the market leader, had a strangle-hold on the industry, and though a few alternatives – Reckon, Quickbooks – tried to squeeze out a space for themselves, MYOB was too embedded in the accounting industry.
But the rise of cloud accounting has changed all that. Besides the reinvention of a couple of old brands (QuickBooks and Reckon – though the latter has exited the market again), it’s also birthed a new market leader in Xero, which now has more paid member accounts in Australia and New Zealand than arch rival MYOB. Continue reading Do Bookkeepers Need to Learn All Accounting Programs?
IF YOU FOLLOW XERO in the news, then you might already be aware that since the cloud accounting giant’s migrated over to Amazon Web Services (AWS), the technology arm of the e-commerce company, Xero’s servers have gone offline a number of times — twice this March alone.
On March 1, Xero’s 800,000-plus customers were unable to access their online accounts for several hours when an AWS outage left cloud computing services offline around the world.
Two weeks later, Xero had server issues again. This time an upgrade to its database server to improve performance resulted in issues that prevented some Xero users from logging into their account or to experience issues using the service once they did log in.
Unlike some MYOB products, most cloud accounting programs, like Xero and QuickBooks, don’t allow for users to access their accounts in an offline mode or to download a copy of their own data to store locally on their computer or tablet.
MYOB, for example, allows users to access and work on a local desktop version of their accounts, which they can then sync with the cloud when they’re finished. This means, that even if the MYOB server is down, MYOB users can still work on and access their accounts, and sync later when the server is back online. (Or, conversely, when the user is back online, which handy in case of internet access issues.)
Amazon Web Services provides either partial or complete cloud hosting to all three of the top cloud accounting programs — Xero, QuickBooks and MYOB — yet only Xero appears to have been significantly impacted by the AWS outage this past March.
While QuickBooks is mostly hosted by parent company, Intuit’s, own servers; some features and functions of the QuickBooks service have been developed on AWS as well, though it’s not totally reliant on the Amazon service and may have been spared from the Amazon outage.
But two key cloud-based MYOB products — MYOB Essentials and MYOB Advanced — have operated on AWS since 2011. Because users can access their MYOB products offline, however, any interruption to their service appears to have been minimal.
For what it’s worth, Amazon Web Services is the largest cloud hosting company in the world. It’s used by Netflix, Spotify and Apple Music, none of which went offline during the AWS outage.
A Xero spokesman promised a “post-mortem” to learn what happened to cause their service to go offline on March 1, admitting that the company didn’t realise “it was entirely reliant on a United States storage facility operated by AWS until it crashed.”
Although AWS is the largest and, probably, most reliable cloud hosting service in the world, it’s not immune to problems. The challenge, then, for companies, such as Xero, is to learn from and about the potential issues that can arise, and implement measure to mitigate the impact to their customers.
In Xero’s case, a simple offline mode could have prevented much of the ire its outage caused bookkeepers, accountants and small business owners trying to access their service on a time limit.
Want to learn how to use Xero like a pro? Our Xero online training courses include EVERYTHING for ONE LOW PRICE. Furthermore, if you select our Lifetime Membership option, you’ll have LIFETIME access to our ongoing course updates. EzyLearn courses are endorsed by industry professionals and can be counted towards Continuing Professional Development (CPD) points. Find out more about our Xero online training courses.
