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When a Bookkeeper Isn’t Just a Bookkeeper

start your own bookkeeping business registered BAS agent business

Why NOW is the time to become a work-for-yourself bookkeeper

THERE ARE UMPTEEN REASONS why starting a bookkeeping business is a great low-cost venture for people looking to take a step back from the corporate world, or even for those looking to do quite the opposite by working from home so they have the flexibility they need as parents to young children.

If you’re a subscriber of this blog, then you’ve read posts about National Bookkeeping, the company EzyLearn has partnered with to deliver training courses to people who become National Bookkeeping licensees.

However, I’m going to talk about it again because there are still too many talented people out there who don’t think they have what it takes to go into business for themselves. And I’m here to tell you, you do, and we’ll help you!

Continue reading When a Bookkeeper Isn’t Just a Bookkeeper
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Engaged Students Gain the Most From Their Training

One-to-one training can be extremely gratifying for the trainer and student alike

online learning and one-to-one learning engages people better
Mark Zuckerberg is proof that you can be highly successful even if you didn’t learn well at school. One-to-one learning tends to engage people better as you can customise your training more to what interests them.

THERE’S A COMMON MISCONCEPTION that, to be smart or successful, you had to do well at school.

But, in fact, there are scores of people who didn’t do well at school (usually because they weren’t engaged or interested in what they were learning), but who have gone on to become highly successful nonetheless.

Mark Zuckerberg is one of the most famous examples of recent years. (Zuckerberg’s failure to graduate has achieved such mythical status that his sister, Randi, often jokingly introduces herself as a Harvard Graduate, before acknowledging that, yes, she’s the sister of that Zuckerberg.)

I worked with a 16 year-old recently, who had an excellent aptitude for computers that weren’t being developed at school. As a consequence, his grades were suffering. I wanted to help him start a business of his own that he could grow and develop successfully, rather than see him end up in dead-end, low paid jobs. Continue reading Engaged Students Gain the Most From Their Training

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QuickBooks Connect VIP Event & One-to-One Bookkeeping Training

QuickBooks Connect VIP event, Ross Miller Rehab Consultant, Sharon Doyle, Tracey O'Niell BAS Agents, Training for bookkeeping business

QuickBooks Online Promoting Accounting App Partners

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
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Are People Willing to Pay For One-to-One Training?

Why Business People Need a Bookkeeping Trainer

IN ONE-TO-ONE training sessions, your job, as the trainer, is to help your client (the student) achieve their individual goals. This is very different to classroom or group training, where the purpose is to get students through the prescribed course content in the prescribed time.

Now that it’s well-known that nearly every person learns at a different pace to the person sitting next to them, online training has become popular because it allows an individual to learn at their own pace, rather than trying to keep up with the rest of the class.

Online vs. one-to-one training

Online and one-to-one training are similar in many ways. They both allow students to learn at their own pace, to pick and choose which modules they start and end with, and to practice until they feel confident that they’ve learned the content thoroughly.

But one-to-one training provides students with something online training can’t: guidance from an expert. This is important for some people who don’t feel comfortable learning on their own, or who need the added motivation of having a trainer with them.

People will pay for the benefits

women studying accredited training course online in MYOB Quickbooks XeroThe cost of one-to-one training is often justified by the benefit. For businesses, they can get paid faster if their bookkeeper has received in-depth training in MYOB, QuickBooks or Xero; they may win more tenders and save time working on them if their staff have advanced Word skills; have better reporting because their staff have advanced Excel skills; or save hundreds by increasing their productivity through their staff’s use of apps like Google G Suite.

The question for trainers is whether they can make it worthwhile printing out workbooks, driving to their client, finding parking, and spending their time training students in-person.

Combining online and one-to-one training

Some students will only require guidance on certain modules or at certain points during their training. For instance, most people need help getting started with MYOB, but only require help during the advanced modules of Excel. That has a lot to do with each individual person’s soft skills, and experience with the software package in question. (Most people are already very familiar with Excel, for example, but have almost no knowledge of MYOB until they start learning.)

Combining online and one-to-one training is a great way to keep your overheads down as a trainer (printing, petrol, parking costs, etc) and provide your client with an affordable training option that still helps them achieve their goals. EzyLearn online training courses are endorsed and by industry professionals, accountants, bookkeepers and registered BAS agents alike

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If you’re an experienced bookkeeper, you can become a training partner: find out how.


The benefits of combining one-to-one training with the structure of an online training course

Tracey-ONeill-Xero-Certified-BAS-Agent-Bookkeeper-for-bookeeping-training-and-consultingI’ve been a Bookkeeper for more than 20 years and find more and more business owners are asking for training because today’s bookkeeping tasks aren’t quite as easy as the software companies make out. Learning how to use bookkeeping software one-to-one combined with an online course is a great way to learn because, as a trainer, I cover all the topics my clients need in a logical order which follows the flow of the course and which will also help them in their daily operations, but clients can also learn what they need to specific to their own situation.”

Tracey O’Neill, Registered BAS Agent and Bookkeeper, QuickBooks Pro Advisor

 


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Google Can Help You Make More Money – And It’s Not by Using Adwords!

Helping tradespeople, sole traders and contractors manage and keep clients

As a tradesperson or sole trader, don’t be one of the many who loses out on work opportunities because you’re not savvy online – for marketing and organisational purposes.

I’VE WRITTEN ABOUT how tradespeople can earn more money quickly and easily by using cloud accounting software like Xero or QuickBooks to quote, invoice and manage their clients. But this applies to anybody out there working for themselves; as a sole trader or contractor. 

In a recent home renovation I was involved with in Newcastle, NSW, I met many tradies with a lot of work on, and even more with plenty of work in the pipeline; but they had no system to manage it all. They frequently didn’t follow up on jobs they’d quoted for, didn’t get back to people enquiring about their services, and provided fairly terrible customer service in general. And they were losing money, as a result.

Increase your productivity with Google G Suite

There’s no reason for tradespeople, contractors or sole traders to lose business because they don’t have a system in place to ensure they remain productive. I work with lots of remote contractors, and I love it because we’re able collaborate on projects at all different times of the day, easily and efficiently.

When I owned a compliance management company called EzyAccess, I worked with lots of different contractors who were located all over Australia. There was Frankie in customer service, located in the Gold Coast, Queensland; Gary, our product specialist located in Goulburn, New South Wales; and our computer guys, Linus and Rodger, each from Sydney; along with three other women located in Sydney — Dulcie, Michelle and Angela — responsible for admin and marketing respectively. of course, then there was me: travelling between Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide.

Manage your time efficiently

To manage my team of remote contractors, I used Google G Suite (then called Google Apps for Work) — Google Calendar, in particular

We used Google Calendar to schedule time for particular tasks each person was working on so everyone knew what everyone else was up to, and could easily schedule time to collaborate on certain projects that required help from other team members — Linus and Rodger, for instance, frequently collaborated on projects. We also used Google Calendar to schedule meetings (internal and external ones) and sales calls. (More specifically, we’ve given a case study of a hairdressing salon doing this in a previous blog post.)

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Set up your own Google G-Suite with our Digital and Social Media Online Course


If you need help setting up your Google G Suite account, and would like to learn how your business can become more productive and earn more money, we cover Google G Suite in our Digital and Social Media training course. Visit our website for more information or to enrol.


 

 

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Use Facebook Ads to Stay Front of Mind With People Who Already Know You

Don’t miss a golden opportunity to build brand awareness!

woman recognising brand

I RECENTLY SPOKE WITH a few different Novocastrian real estate agents recently about a property I was renovating. One of them had a billboard near a train station, another paid for bus stop ads, and another created trailer signs that could be towed and parked in strategic places. None of them used Google or Facebook ads. This was a missed opportunity, and I’ll tell you why in a moment.

Outdoor advertising, along with DL flyers and advertising in your local newspaper, are designed to keep your brand in front of mind with people who know you and live in your local area. Brand awareness is an incredibly important marketing strategy for any business. We took a look late last year at how bookkeepers can learn from real estate agents about marketing using Facebook.

Social and digital marketing is crucial

Although outdoor and print marketing are important brand building tactics, digital and social media marketing should form a part of your brand campaigns. The internet is where most people turn to get information quickly, even local information.

We used Facebook ads in our social and digital marketing strategy we used for McGrath real estate agent Derek Farmer. A client list of names based on mobile phone numbers was used to target people in the Northbridge area who already had some past experience with Derek — they’d met at an auction, open home, he’d sold a friend or neighbour’s home, or they’d previously bought one of his listings. We helped Derek achieve Page 1 rankings on Google without using any paid advertising.

Targeted Facebook ads keep you front of mind

This targeted advertising helped build brand awareness with those people in a relatively non-invasive way, so that when Derek did reach out to them by phone, email or in-person, they would already be very aware of who Derek was and the type of property sales he specialised in.

This ensured Derek didn’t lose a listing because someone couldn’t remember who he was, and ended up listing their property with an agent who did take the time to build brand awareness within their local community and with past clients.

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Do you want help growing your online and social media presence?

Social Media and Digital Marketing online training course_comp

Are you in business as a bookkeeper, tradesperson, retailer, trainer or real estate agent and want to stand out from the crowd? We can teach you the online marketing techniques to help you do just this! Check out what’s included in our comprehensive Social Media and Digital Marketing online training courses. Alternatively, you can learn more about Facebook targeted advertising in our Facebook training courses.


 

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Amazon is Here, But How Do You Get Traffic?

enterprise resource planning systems learn myob xero quickbooks online training course videos

Can you make real money by selling on Amazon?

NOW THAT AMAZON has launched in Australia, one of the hottest work-at-home opportunities is to become an Amazon seller, especially if you become part of the “fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) program”, which is due to launch in Australia in 2018, along with Amazon’s “fresh” program.

We have helped hundreds of bookkeepers to find work and launch into business for themselves, and so we wanted to investigate some of the pros and cons of venturing into business selling products on Amazon.

In the FBA program, there are no upfront costs, and sellers don’t hold any stock or have to worry about shipping products to customers — they just have to find items to sell on Amazon.

Continue reading Amazon is Here, But How Do You Get Traffic?
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Xero Training Course May 2018 UPDATE

Cloud Accounting Software is CONSTANTLY Updated – SO IS OUR XERO COURSE

Xero Product Releases, LIFELONG Learning, LIFETIME Course access, Updates, best Xero Training CourseWhen 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:

  • online digital marketing,
  • online pre-sales and student support, and
  • course content creation.

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 Xero Payroll Administration Training Course to Advanced Xero Payroll online course dashboardBeginners and Advanced Xero Training Course updates

Almost 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.

Available to New, Current Students and LIFELONG Students

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.

EzyLearn Discount Voucher Coupons online training for Office, Excel, Xero, MYOB, Marketing courses 2Get all the Xero Course details at our FAQ’s.

Current Discounts for Xero Training Courses

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.

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When It’s Good to Offer Free Bookkeeping Help

woman working as a bookkeeper for free

Providing an initial consultation free of charge

IT’S NEVER REALLY a good idea to work for new client or potential new clients for free, particularly if you’re an established business. But it’s also difficult getting a client to feel comfortable that you’ll do a good job for them, when they don’t know you from the proverbial bar of soap.

Rather than working for free or charging less than the minimum wage for your bookkeeping services a better idea is to spend some time with your client, either in-person or over the phone, to go through your processes and procedures before you commence work for them. It’s also important that you make your clients aware of value adds you’re providing to them.

Continue reading When It’s Good to Offer Free Bookkeeping Help
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TSheets for Independent and Remote Contractors

TSheets is a cost effective way to manage and track your time

tsheets by quickbooks logoTSheets, THE TIME MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE, is a great way for independent and remote contractors to manage their client’s projects. It’s especially useful for contractors who are collaborating remotely with other contractors and businesses on one project.

There are a bunch of other handy tools contractors and sole traders can use for expense tracking and forecasting too.

But back to TSheets. TSheets was recently acquired by Intuit, the parent company of QuickBooks. Both TSheets and QuickBooks shared 12,000 customers in common and the time management system had been developed to work specifically with QuickBooks. Deeper integration with QuickBooks can be expected now, following the acquisition.

The acquisition is part of the push into the cloud accounting ecosystem that’s being led by the major cloud accounting companies. (Read: EzyLearn’s explainer on the TSheets acquisition and the cloud accounting ecosystem.)

Inexpensive time tracking

expense apps for self employed peopleIf you were to think about the top three cloud accounting apps in terms of the types of businesses they appeal to, QuickBooks would appeal most to micro businesses and independent contractors. Check out an earlier blog post where we assess two main factors: User Experience & Ease of Use, and Reporting Tools in a comparison between MYOB and Quickbooks for small businesses.

The popularity of Quickbooks for contractors and the like is not just because it’s by far the cheaper system compared with Xero and MYOB. QuickBooks has also spent a lot of time simplifying the process of managing business accounts so that, while it may not be the most robust program, it’s by far the most accessible.

TSheets has been built the same way. It’s also one of the most inexpensive time tracking systems — at a minimum of $30 per month for two users, while it’s free for one user to use TSheets for unlimited projects.

Bookkeeping Academy to include TSheets

New content is being added to our Bookkeeping Academy “Academic Development Program” to include using TSheets with QuickBooks (or Xero and any other cloud accounting system it integrates with).  The Bookkeeping Academy is where you can purchase online training via short courses that you can use for Continuing Professional Development (CPD) or Continuing Professional Education (CPE) or to upskill or re-train in one particular area. You can earn CPD points with our cloud accounting packages.

Read more about why continuing education for bookkeepers is so important in this ever-changing industry.

online bookkeeping courses to earn cpd points

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MYOB Launches Single Touch Payroll Trial Product

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

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Does the ICB Have a Conflict of Interest?

a registered BAS agent wanting to join an industry association

How to get your CPD points

a registered BAS agent wanting to join an industry association
Membership with an industry association, even if a registered BAS agent, is not compulsory and you don’t have to rely on them as a source for obtaining your requisite CPD points.

NOT LONG AGO we published a post about industry associations, such as the Institute of Certified Bookkeepers (ICB), and how they were useful for would-be BAS agents because a membership makes it easier to register with the Tax Practitioners Board (TPB).

Industry associations also help registered BAS agents, who are required to complete a minimum of 45 hours of continuing professional development (CPD) within a three year period, to maintain their CPD hours by providing them with access to “approved” training courses, webinars, seminars, and so on.

In the past, most industry associations would refer BAS agents to a number of partner training organisations that provided relevant training courses. However, industry associations, such as the ICB, have increasingly started running their own training courses, both online and in-person.

CPA’s conflict of interest

Although the TPB provides guidelines for the types of training courses that will be accepted as evidence of CPD, industry associations still possess a considerable amount of oversight. If a BAS agent is a member of an industry association, the TPB doesn’t question their CPD training because it’s supposedly been approved by the industry association.

Recently, questions have been raised about CPA Australia’s potential conflict of interest as the organisation also operates a financial planning business, CPA Advice, as an affiliate of the industry body.

But new rules that will come into effect in 2024 stipulate that to provide financial advice, you must be a member of a monitoring body or professional association (such as CPA Australia), but that the professional association cannot be an Australian Financial Services licensee or an affiliate of a licensee.

Is providing and overseeing CPD training a conflict?

EzyLearn, until very recently, used to be an ICB partner. When the ICB started offering their own training courses, their promotion of partner training providers, like EzyLearn, reduced considerably in favour of promoting their own training courses and seminars.

In other words, in many ways, the ICB started competing with their partner organisations. Our return on investment (ROI) had never been great anyway, so EzyLearn decided to cancel our corporate sponsorship as it seemed the ICB had a conflict of interest. Although the TPB may not see it that way.

What about the Business Support Program?

For $396 a year, the ICB also offers businesses that do not have a bookkeeper doing their books, access to training materials and information on how they can manage their own bookkeeping on their own without a bookkeeper.

That’s despite charging BAS agents and bookkeepers as much as $480 annually in membership fees, which they promise will help them to get clients — and the sponsorship fees to partner training providers that provide the same or similar services.

Membership with an industry association is not compulsory

Joining an industry association can be incredibly useful, but membership is not compulsory. And as industry associations try to find new ways to extract revenue from the industry — through paid memberships, sponsorships, training courses and even undercutting their members and sponsors by directly offering services which help businesses do their own bookkeeping — they stop being a critical resource for professional bookkeepers and BAS agents working in the industry.

Instead, bookkeepers and BAS agents can complete their CPD training anywhere. For $175 a year (or $15 per month), EzyLearn offers a membership called the Bookkeeping Academy, which gives members access to a complete library of content, including instructional videos, on how to carry out common bookkeeping tasks in MYOB, QuickBooks and Xero. Visit the Bookkeeping Academy website for more information.

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Online bookkeeping accounting training courses for CPD points

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Is Xero’s Partner Program Really Affiliate Marketing?

Partnering exclusively with Xero

What to know about partnering exclusively with Xero

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?

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Do Bookkeepers Need to Learn All Accounting Programs?

female bookkeeper with diverse skills

Ways to diversify your bookkeeping skills

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?

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The Cloud Accounting Risk

When the downside of cloud accounting becomes apparent

man frustrated when xero goes offline
Many of Xero’s customers were exasperated, to say the least, at Xero going offline, leaving them unable to access their accounts.

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.

No options for offline access

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.)

Xero, QuickBooks MYOB and AWS

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.

Xero to learn from AWS issues

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.

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smart woman realising xero most popular accounting software program in australia and nzWant 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. 


 

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What are Practitioner-Created (and Endorsed) Training Courses?

women studying accredited training course online in MYOB Quickbooks Xero

Learn from the professionals living and working in your industry

women studying accredited training course online in MYOB Quickbooks Xero

YOU HEAR A LOT about industry association-accredited training courses and internationally accredited training couses; which are typically training that’s delivered by an industry association at a prescribed time, in person, or delivered by a third party provider.

EzyLearn chose to be an Institute of Certified Bookkeepers (ICB)-accredited training provider for six years until this February, when we pivoted to focus on practitioner-created training courses instead.

“Real world” training courses

EzyLearn’s course content has always focussed on real world scenarios, whether that’s in our case studies or in the exercises students are asked to complete. That’s because we want our students to get a thorough grasp of the kind of work they’ll be expected to do during the course of their job.

That’s especially true for students of our MYOB, Xero and QuickBooks training courses, who either are, or will work, as bookkeepers for a number of different clients from different industries. So instead of including generalised case studies and exercises in our course work, we include ones that relate to specific types of businesses and transactions you’ll encounter working as a bookkeeper.

The same is true for our Excel training courses, where you can learn how to use Excel to estimate the return on investment (ROI) on a granny flat, among other real-world exercises.

The “practitioner-created” difference

We’re able to do this because our training courses are created by bookkeeping and accounting professionals, not by software companies.

Software companies and their developers do a great job at creating accounting software to manage a business’s accounting needs. But they don’t always know which different accounting scenarios will apply and when. Bookkeepers who understand Australian tax do, however.

EzyLearn doesn’t teach Australian tax law or procedures, but because our courses are developed by accounting practitioners, they’ll show you where different tax procedures apply.

Industry association courses

Membership with an industry association or associations can be a popular choice for some registered BAS agents and they often provide training to their members as part of their continuing professional development (CPD). This training usually takes the form of in-person seminars, which may discuss legislative changes or feature a product demonstration from a software company; and webinars that discuss similar.

For in-depth software training, most associations — the ICB, for example — refer students to an accredited third-party training organisation. This third-party accredited organisation will have chosen to become accredited with the ICB and pays an annual fee to them in order to have this accreditation and be able to share this fact on their website.

A lot software training organisations are partners with a provider, like Xero or MYOB, and the train students according to how MYOB or Xero recommend them to. There’s nothing wrong with this kind of training, particularly if you’re only in need of a quick refresh or a general software skills.

Software partners vs. bookkeeping practitioners

Most software partners are companies that understand software and cloud computing first, bookkeeping and accounting second. But training companies that offer courses developed by practitioners have set the new benchmark in software training.

EzyLearn has always offered practitioner-created training courses, and now we’re going to work with more practitioners to create more courses, and more content for existing courses.

Over the six years that EzyLearn was an ICB-accredited training organisation, we found that it wasn’t our industry association accreditation that brought students to our courses, it was the content, grounded in real-world scenarios, that did.

Practitioners create high watermark

Instead of learning how to create a pivot table in Excel, or other data sources you can use to create a pivot table, containing any old data and for any old reason, our practitioner create — and endorsed — Excel training courses give you a real-world example exercise to work from, so you understand when and why you will need to use a pivot table.

That’s important because Excel, as anyone who’s used it at an advanced level will know, is a complex maze of tables and graphs and formulas. So when it comes to Excel skills, you either use them or lose them. By grounding our Excel training content in real-world examples, it makes it just that much easier to hold on to what you’ve learnt until you do get to use them.

(If you do happen to lose them, students enrolled in our lifetime access courses can always go back and refresh their skills whenever they want.) By the way, we’ve written previously about the mighty Excel pivot table.

Continuing professional development courses

If you’re a bookkeeper or BAS agent used to working with one software — MYOB, say — you can update your skills with our Xero or QuickBooks training courses, which can be counted towards your continuing professional development (CPD) hours.

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Find out more about the online training courses we provide and those helping to create, endorse and who are benefiting from our courses.

learn to use excel online training course videos cheap best

Learn Microsoft Excel from scratch or brush up your Excel skills, at your own pace, with our affordable Excel online training courses — where you get THE LOT (that’s 9 courses in total) for ONE LOW PRICE — everything included! Volume corporate discounts are available and our courses count towards CPD Points.

Creating and managing databases is included as part of our Advanced Microsoft Excel training courses — and you receive access to ALL OF OUR COURSES, including ALL SKILLS LEVELS for ONE LOW PRICE. You can even start your Excel journey with our FREE Beginners’ Excel Course Workbook. Read more about our beginners’, intermediate and advanced Excel training courses on our website, or enrol to start learning by 5pm tomorrow!