Category: Services

Services provided by EzyLearn

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How Would You Like to Earn a Share of $237 Billion?

Want a share of $237 billion? If you're in business it's up for grabs!
Want a share of $237 billion? If you’re in online business it’s up for grabs!

If you spent money on Christmas pressies recently, you’re a small part in the continual climb of online trading in this country. Did you know that in 2012, the value of online trading in Australia reached $237 billion dollars? This represents a 25 percent increase year-on-year, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. This increase in online revenue reflects the growing number of small businesses moving their operations online, either in part or entirely — and it’s largely thanks to new technologies facilitating e-commerce for small business.

The Growth of Online Businesses

Prior to 2006 the online marketplace was all but monopolised by the eBays and Amazons, organisations that had the resources to create the necessary infrastructure needed to allow customers to shop entirely online. After 2006, when we first moved our MYOB training courses online, offering a completely online shopping experience was just starting to gain popularity among the small players like ourselves; in the years since, it’s now pretty much become the norm.

As platforms like WordPress have made it possible to create and maintain a website without any design or HTML knowledge, theme clubs like Woo Themes, which provide web-themes to suit a range of different business types, now even include ecommerce plugins that can be linked with a PayPal account.

By offering you services online, you’re opening yourself up to an entirely global customer base, allowing you to offer new or different services than you did before. Since we moved our business online, we’ve also been able to build on our business — this year we added the highly popular Small Business Management Course to our suite of training courses, for example.

For some businesses, moving online is more of a necessity, a way to stay competitive in a world with ever-evolving technologies. For example, new cloud accounting software like Reach (and we offer a course in Reach Accounting too) makes it easier for small businesses to manage their own books, without needing the services of a bookkeeper.

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For many bookkeepers this could spell doom and gloom, or it could provide them with the opportunity to venture into the business of training people on how to manage their own books. As a bookkeeper looking to extend their services into training as well, by setting up a website with an e-commerce facility, you could partner with us to sell vouchers to our training courses.

With a share of $237 billion up for grabs, now is a good time to consider offering your services online, particularly when it’s become so darn easy! We even offer WordPress training courses, which covers setting up ecommerce, so you’ve no excuse for missing out!

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CASE STUDY: Is Reach Reaching the Mark? Hear the Honest Opinion of a Business Owner…

We test drive Reach to see if it reaches the mark for one small business owner.
We test drive Reach to see if it reaches the mark for one small business owner.

We’ve recently added a Reach Accounting course to our suite of online training courses. In a previous post, we gave you the low down on how the Reach Accounting package stacks up against MYOB, but we thought we’d find out what a real, present-day business owner had to say about Reach. So, we asked Angela, a freelance journalist, to test drive Reach for 30 days and then provide us with her honest feedback. Here’s what she had to say:

“As a freelancer, my business is pretty straightforward: I write words for a living and charge people to use them. As a creativity merchant, I’m not paid by the hour; I’m paid for each word that survives the ‘delete’ button, which is fortunate since the left side of my brain is a bit lazy.

Getting new commissions (or business) is a process that involves a bit of back-and-forth with editors over email — outlining story ideas, deadlines and finally agreeing on a price. As such, I never have the need to create estimates and I don’t need to log the time I spend working on my stories.

I’ve been using Zoho Invoice ever since I started freelancing, mainly because I didn’t have a spare five hours to create an invoice template in Excel when I first set up shop. To me, Zoho looked like the easy way out — and to date, it has been.

But how does it compare to the latest bit of accounting software, Reach Accounting? I’ve spent a bit of time using Reach, and for its price point and target market, it’s a pretty handy piece of software for sole traders and small businesses — I can see that it would be particularly valuable for virtual assistants and teleworkers.

As soon as you sign up for your Reach account, you’re asked to enter in your basic, yet important, business information — like your ABN and bank account details — so, without doing anything else, you can send an invoice to one of your customers right away. With Zoho, there was some setting up of invoice templates, adding customers and setting up email gateways, which was a bit tedious.

Then there’s the matter of cost. While Zoho allows you to invoice your customers in Australian dollars, it’s still an American company so your $15 monthly fee is subject to change with the exchange rate; you’re also charged a currency conversion fee from your bank, which is something to be wary of.

Reach, on the other hand, is an Australian company so you don’t need to worry about exchange rates and conversion fees; something I find quite appealing. Plus, included in Reach’s $14.95 monthly fee is the actual accounting software, whereas a full suite of accounting software with Zoho costs a little more.

With Reach, you’re effectively getting more bang for buck and even if I don’t use the accounting side of Reach’s offering, it’s good to know it’s there. I feel the same way about the bread maker I have at home, even though I don’t actually eat bread. Which raises the question: how many businesses would end up using the full accounting side of Reach?

As an accounting novice, I still have an accountant who weaves their magic, presumably in MYOB. I just export and email my earnings for that year, along with my business expenses — which is basically my entire life since I’m a freelancer, so the lack of an ‘export’ function in Reach is a major drawback for me.

I imagine most sole traders and small businesses would do something similar with their accountants and I don’t know how many accountants would be eager to use Reach.

But Reach excels precisely because it isn’t MYOB — or even Xero, for that matter. And it doesn’t need to be. Reach caters to a section of the market that was previously alienated by the likes of MYOB; and now those business owners have a low-cost, easy-to-use solution to their Excel spreadsheet and shoebox-full of receipts. It’s also Australian; and supporting Australian businesses, as an Australian business, myself, just makes sense.

So, at the end of the day, for my money, it’s worth it.”

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If you’re a sole trader or small business owner looking for a low-cost way to manage the accounting side of your business, Reach could be the solution. EzyLearn has partnered with Reach Accounting so that you can access a free student account when you enrol in our Reach training course.

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Reach Accounting vs MYOB: What’s the Right Accounting Software for You?

which-one
We help you figure out whether Reach is better than MYOB for your small business.

We’re thrilled to announce the addition of our new online training course for cloud-based accounting software — Reach Accounting. It’s a great, low-cost option for small business owners. But there are some businesses that will still be suited to MYOB, so let’s take a closer look at how Reach compares to MYOB to help you select the best accounting software for your business.

Bank Feeds and Payment Gateways

The first thing you’ll probably use in Reach is the invoicing software, which is not entirely different to MYOB — or Zoho or Xero, either. (On that note, we’ve also introduced a new Xero course to our suite of online courses.) In Reach you can enter all of your company details, set up customers, enter your bank account details, create an invoice (or use the pre-defined template), and so on.

Where Reach differs from MYOB, however, is that it doesn’t offer a bank feeds service, which means that you still need to manually record each payment your customer makes. This can be a time-consuming process, particularly if you don’t stay on top of it — which can be embarrassing if you set up the automatic late-payment reminder service, and then forget to record your customers’ payments.

The other points of difference between Reach and MYOB is that Reach does not allow you to set-up payment gateways to connect your PayPal account, nor can you connect your Reach account directly to an online web store; functions that are handy for online businesses.

While those functions aren’t currently available, Reach does have plans to make them available in the future. But if you’re not going to miss those functions, or aren’t likely to use them, anyway, then the Reach Accounting software will work for your business.

What Reach Will Enable You to Do

Reach allows you to create invoices and estimates, manage your payroll, expenses and complete your BAS return, among many of the other traditional accounting functions you find in MYOB.

Students who enrol in our online Reach training course will be able to access a trial version of Reach for 30 days while you complete the course — so enrol today! You can also find out what a small business owner thought of Reach as a solution for them after test-driving it for 30 days.

 

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Does Your Business have a Facebook Page? Here’s 6 Reasons Why You Should!

Do your small business justice and develop a Facebook page.
Do your small business justice and develop a Facebook page.

After they complete our small business management course or MYOB training course many of our students go on to start their own home-based bookkeeping business. Among the many things you learn in our small business management course is how to effectively market a small business.

Why Market?

For any new business, it’s important to market your new business so develop new leads and customers, but it’s also important that your marketing costs don’t outweigh your income. In the marketing module of our small business management course, we talk about Google Adwords, which is a low-cost way to advertise your business online, using keywords.

Another Option is Facebook

Facebook is also another option for businesses large and small, but we think it works particularly well for small businesses, due to the community-minded nature of Facebook, itself.

There’s an old saying around EzyLearn: People like to do business with people they know, like and trust. Facebook helps you to develop online relationships with your customers, allowing them to get to know, like and trust you.

But in case you’re still not convinced, here are another 6 reasons why you should be on Facebook:

  1. Population and penetration: We know that over 1 billion people are on Facebook, but what’s the penetration rate for a market, like the USA, for example? 67 percent of internet users in the US are on Facebook; in Australia that penetration rate is much higher—82 percent.
  2. Age: Facebook skews young—83 percent of 18-29 year olds are on Facebook—but the 45-54 age-bracket has also seen 46 percent growth since the end of 2012.
  3. Income: The incomes of Facebook users higher than any other social media platform. 73 percent of Facebook users earn more than AUD$75,000 compared to 17 percent for Twitter.
  4. Mobile: Social media is the most popular social media app on smartphones and accounts for 66 percent of total social media sharing on iphones.
  5. Gender: Like every other adverting medium, Facebook also skews toward women, but it’s still more gender neutral than Google+ or Pinterest.
  6. Education: Nearly 75 percent of Australian Facebook users have some form of university or tertiary education.

If you’re looking to target any or all of these demographics for your small business marketing campaign, then create a Facebook page and start marketing your services to your followers.

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Adjusting the tab stops in MS Word (TRAINING VIDEO)

Microsoft Word is still one of the most widely used software programs in every small and large business in the World. Despite free or cheaper alternatives most small business use this software because everyone else does – it means that they don’t have to learn a whole new software program.

Microsoft Word is used to create documents like:

  • Resumes
  • Business sales flyer and brochures
  • Letters
  • Menus
  • Pricelists
  • Business Forms
  • much more

 

Despite how popular it is many people still don’t know how to use it properly. If you ask most people they’ll say they can use Microsoft Word but as soon as you ask them to create a flyer or something that uses multiple columns, images and  alignment you’ll start to discover that there are MANY ways to go about it.

The concept of TABS has been used since the day of the typewriter and in Microsoft Word it’s much more powerful, but who really know how to use them?

 

In addition to our MYOB training courses, we also offer a MS Word training course. If you’ve ever needed to add columns into your word document, you’ve probably done one of two things: counted the number of times you’ve hit the ‘tab’ button, inserted a table or just pressed the space bar until the text lines up. If this applies to you, watch this free training videos (one of MANY in our online Microsoft Word training course)

When you spend the extra time using tabs properly you’ll see how it saves time and lives up to it’s name as a productivity tool. It’s when you want to change the formatting or add new information that you will find the correct use of Tabs in Word VERY rewarding.

If you are looking at starting a new job, promoting a new product using a flyer, sending out a mail merged information letter or many other tasks this year, do it with a new confident, skill level and speed.

 

 

 

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What’s Your Learning Style? Kinaesthetic Learning

Kinaesthetic learners just DO IT!
Kinaesthetic learners just DO IT!

As one of Australia’s largest providers of online MYOB training courses, we’ve come to learn a thing or two about our students’ learning habits and what we’ve discovered is that there are three different kinds of learners — visual learners, auditory learners and kinaesthetic learners.

There’s no right or wrong way of learning, but we thought it would be interesting to have a look at these three learning styles in a little more detail.

Learning … Kinaesthetically 

First up: kinaesthetic learners. People with a kinaesthetic learning style learn by touching and doing things, and although they only make up about 5 percent of the population, they’re a group of learners we see a fair bit at EzyLearn. This is because our training courses are software-based and at some point people become pretty eager to give the software they’re learning about a test drive.

Kinaesthetic learners are the students who learn by discovery, can complete more than one task at once and are those students who like to listen to music while they work.

Kinaesthetic learners are likely to:

  • Need lots of breaks
  • Speak with their hands and gesture a lot
  • Learn by working with others
  • Remember what was done
  • Learn by doing activities

The benefit of being a kinaesthetic learner and studying with EzyLearn is that you’re able to study at your own pace (so you can take lots of breaks), get hands-on with the software and try some of the exercises, and you can also interact with other students at our student community to get that much-need dose of human interaction.

It is this kind of flexibility that online learning offers that makes it so appealing to a broad range of learning styles that the traditional face-to-face offering often can’t provide.

Not a kinaesthetic learner? See tomorrow’s post on visual learners.

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We Can Help You Deliver Your Company Training Material ONLINE

Now that’s going to be nasty … is your business complying with current WHS regulations?

When we moved our training materials online, we developed our own learning management system, a software application that administers our MYOB training course, small business management course and all of our other online training courses.

Deliver Your Company Training Material Online – Work Health and Safety

But an opportunity exists for small to medium-sized businesses to deliver their company training material online, using EzyLearn’s learning management system — this is particularly useful for work health and safety (WHS) training.

Now that Australia’s WHS laws have changed, there’s a renewed push for businesses to be vigilant when it comes to workplace safety. Harsher punishments for business owners found to be in breach of the WHS Act 2011 now includes fines of up to $3 million per organisation and $600,000 or 5 years imprisonment per person, per breach.

The changes follow a rash of litigation across the country, where companies have been prosecuted for not ensuring that contractors and sub-contractors working on their premises have been made aware of all the potential risks and hazards associated with carrying out work on their premises.

Under the Act, a business owner can be prosecuted based on what they can be reasonably expected to know in relation to work health and safety risks. This means that, if a contractor carrying out welding on the premises of a business is injured, the business owner can be prosecuted because it is reasonable to expect the business owner to know that carrying out welding near flammable gases is hazardous.

Contractor and Sub-Contractor Liability

The move to include contractors and sub-contractors carrying out work for, or on behalf of, a business is one of the key changes to the WHS Act 2011, which was introduced in January 2012, and replaces the previous OH&S Act 1991. This presents a number of potential areas of risk for business owners who retain the services of contractors, and even remote, home-based workers.

In a landmark ruling in 2011, the Administrative Appeals Tribunal in Queensland awarded a Telstra employee legal and medical costs after she slipped and fell down the stairs twice while working from her Brisbane home.

The tribunal’s ruling has effectively extended the employer’s liability beyond what they traditionally thought was reasonable, to include the unknowns of an employee’s home. As such, for small business owners employing or retaining the services of home-based workers, making certain you have the correct WHS procedures and training in place should be a priority.

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Using EzyLearn’s learning management system to deliver your company’s WHS training materials allows your staff, contractors or remote workers to access the content regardless of where they’re based, so you have peace of mind in knowing that they’ve been made properly aware of any risks or hazards relating to their work — and their workplace.

If you would like to know more about how EzyLearn’s learning management system works, contact us.

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Now YOU Can Start Your Own Online Training Business

If you are a bookkeeper, selling online MYOB training courses to your clients could be the perfect complement to your business.
If you are a bookkeeper, selling online MYOB training courses to your clients could be the perfect complement to your business.

We’ve mentioned before how we offer enrolment vouchers for our MYOB training courses, which we sell to training organisations and accountants. The idea is that accountants and other trainers can give their customers additional training without having to having to provide the materials and content themselves.

Are you a Bookkeeper? What about Becoming an Online Trainer Too?

But this also presents the opportunity for existing bookkeepers to extend their businesses into the area of online training. We’re looking to partner with existing bookkeepers who would like to provide online MYOB training courses, for which we’d provide the website, tailored to your business needs.

For bookkeepers, this allows you to extend your business beyond just bookkeeping, and use your knowledge and skills to train others in MYOB without having to provide the course content or the necessary infrastructure to facilitate an online training course to your students.

For EzyLearn, it gives us the opportunity to extend our reach and capture a larger pool of students we may not have previously been able to reach. It also fulfils our goal of helping bookkeepers start their own businesses and take control of their careers.

How Does It Work?

Sound interesting? This is how it would work: you register your interest in working with us, and we would have a conversation about your business goals. If both parties are happy to move forward, we’d provide you with a website, tailored to your needs, and sell you the initial stock — vouchers for EzyLearn’s famous MYOB training course, which you would then sell onto your clients.

The end result is a partnership where we provide the materials and infrastructure to operate a training business. What you do after that is entirely up to you. For instance, you might decide to bundle our online training course with one-on-one training, for which you’d charge extra for your time. The possibilities are endless!

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If you’re interested, please let us know what type of online training partnership you want so we can have a discussion about your goals and what’s on offer.

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Feel Threatened by a Newcomer in Your Workplace? Gain Knowledge, Instead!

The more confident you are in your abilities the less threatened you will feel by the arrival of a newcomer to the workplace.
The more confident you are in your abilities the less threatened you will feel by the arrival of a newcomer to the workplace.

As part of our MYOB Training Course, we’re constantly adding new content and helping our students win work and improve their employability. That’s why we always emphasise the importance of continuing to educate yourself — for the obvious skills advantages you bring to any company, but also for your own confidence.

For many people, it can be a little nerve racking when new blood enters the workplace and in today’s job market, it’s not at all uncommon to see a new face appear. Sometimes it’s in the form of a new employee there to share your workload and other times it’s because your organisation has employed someone to help restructure the business so they operate more efficiently.

The Many and Varied Threat

For many employees, this new face around the office can make them feel threatened — threatened about the future of their jobs and threatened by the prospect of the office dynamic changing. Fortunately, however, there’s an antidote for this rather common reaction to change: taking a course or continuing professional development.

The thing about feeling threatened is that it’s entirely to do with your confidence. You may feel like you’re not quite as educated or as skilled as this other person and as a result, you think your employer won’t need you any more. The truth is, your employer probably has no intention of letting you go, but nevertheless, the job market is changing and up-skilling to increase your knowledge base is invaluable — to you and your employer.

Confidence in Upskilling and Continuing Professional Development

Aside from the tangible knowledge and experience a highly-skilled employee brings to an organisation, they also bring with them confidence. The more secure you feel with your ability to do your job and do it well, the more confident you’ll feel as a result. For this reason, EzyLearn is a big believer in continuing professional development.

Our MYOB, and Microsoft Word and Excel training courses each come with lifetime access to the course content, so that you can review the course material and even access updated content, whenever you need it.

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A truly confident person would embrace the idea of working with someone new and potentially learning and sharing knowledge, rather than feeling threatened by them. But the key to achieving this confidence is being able to feel secure in your own knowledge base and that’s what EzyLearn’s Continuing Professional Development Program aims to provide bookkeepers with: knowledge.

So stop worrying, stop feeling threatened, and feel more confident in your skills and knowledge by taking one of our online courses today!

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Internet Marketing Scholarships Available for Mums in Chatswood

Digital Business Course - Google marketingPerhaps you’re a mum who’s available during school hours and want to start your own business? We might have the opportunity for you. Due to the success of our MYOB training courses and with requests from our students we are developing the Digital Business Course in conjunction with the Australian Small Business Centre.

[quote]We’re looking for talented mumpreneurs who want to learn some new skills while working with a live online training business.[/quote]

With the Small Business Management Course on our Learning System we’re keen to help mums create a business plan for their own business from our office right here in Chatswood. If you’re a reader from another part of Australia (or the world for that matter) you can still learn about our developments at this blog and at the Small Business Centre blog.

Michelle provides support for MYOB course students
Michelle provides support for our MYOB training course students

Michelle recently started on our training support team and we are looking for mums to help us with the development of the Digital Business Course and we are looking for mums who have excellent skills or motivation in:

  • Graphic Design
  • Business and Blog Writing
  • Website Design using WordPress
  • Social media
  • Online and Telephone based support
  • Bookkeeping
  • Marketing and Advertising
  • Google Online Marketing

If you would like to join us on a journey of learning and growth please enter your details at this form: http://www.australiansmallbusiness.com.au/services/business-service-provider/ (make sure you mention the EzyLearn blog post and we’ll receive all your information).

You’ll be interested to know that our Digital Business Course is designed around helping a printing business in Artarmon get a professional website using WordPress, but more importantly students will learn about:

  • Integrating social media,
  • Creating and optimising a blog (just like this one!),
  • Using YouTube
  • Using Google Analytics to measure your results
  • Getting the most from Google Adwords
  • Learn about Google authorship
  • Google Local Marketing

Students will also learn about a host of other Google services available to help businesses become more visible to their potential customers and step into the new age of online marketing. Students will learn about how to make a business “relevant” in Google searches.

The other aspect of our Digital Business Course is we want to educate mums how to perform the tasks that many businesses need to become visible online. In the same way that learning MYOB enables mums to work flexible hours from their own home, the Digital Business Course will provide an excellent structure to enable mums to work flexible hours while helping businesses get into the digital age.

Enter your details at this website for an opportunity to win a scholarship:  http://www.australiansmallbusiness.com.au/services/business-service-provider/

 

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Why Join the MYOB Job Seekers Student Community?

Mums study group for MYOB job seekersI recently welcomed Michelle, our newest team member who completed our MYOB training course and whom we found by writing a blog post as opposed to spending lots of money on Seek with no success at all.

[quote]I’m not stressing too much how bad our Seek experience was am I?[/quote]

Moving on, I want to share with you what we discovered are the reasons that students join a study community and more specifically a Study group for specialised programs like MYOB. The reasons are very similar to why some people prefer to do an trainer-led (or class-based) course at places like TAFE.

It’s important to remember the goal for the course and joining a study group and that is to find an MYOB job.

Here are the reasons:

Tips and Tricks using MYOB

You may be studying the same course content as other students, but you will interpret some things differently to others just based on your life and work experiences.

Help with your MYOB course

Just because you’re studying online and there is not a teacher standing at the front of the classroom, help and support is available.

Request more MYOB training

We understand that it can be hard to stay up-to-date with market demands—and costly, too. Software vendors are always changing their products, technologies are changing, and then there is the advent of new ones. But as an employee the more you know about changes to software and new technologies, the more valuable you are to an employer.

Get Inspiration from other MYOB students and our Tutors

At some point in our careers, we’ve all needed some form of mentorship or guidance to inspire us to keep going, to reach our goals and our dreams.

Get Recognition in front of their peers

An award ceremony—where you’re presented with your MYOB certificate is a significant and important part of the learning experience.

Find a Study Buddy

Don’t go it alone, get a study buddy. It make the learning experience much more social and human.

Compare yourself

We all do it at some point or another: we size each other up to see how we’re fairing by comparison.

Read more about our Revamped Student Community and come along and join us.

 

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Admin Assistant position filled and new MYOB job at Chatswood

Michelle provides support for MYOB course students
Michelle provides support for our MYOB training course students

Did you remember receiving that blog post about us looking for a person to work with us doing office admin in Chatswood? Michelle, one of our MYOB course students, completed her Business Service Provider profile and fit the bill so we brought her in for interviewing.

You might recall that we wrote about an MYOB course student who also created a website for her fathers business? It was Michelle!

Michelle is a hard working mother of two teenage children and she has worked hard to learn new skills, while managing her fathers business, building it’s website and lots of other great things.

Michelle is now part of our team and she’s learning a lot of new things about how we operate our business, how we promote ourselves online and also how we use online marketing tools like Google. Most importantly I’m introducing her because she’s available to help current students get through their course as part of our Student Community and Tutor Support program to helps them in their journey to find MYOB jobs.

But more than MYOB, Michelle is currently completing her Cert IV in Small Business Management with the aim of being able to help people start their own business or manage their existing business better.

Welcome aboard Michelle 🙂

We’re revamping our Student Community and Tutor Support service to specifically focus on skills to help students find MYOB jobs and learn small business management skills and Michelle will be available to help students.

MYOB jobs in Chatswood and Gold Coast.

I was so impressed with the result of our search that I’m reaching out again. We are looking for another admin assistant at our Chatswood office and also in the Gold Coast area so if you live in these areas make sure you complete the Business Service Provider and tell us a bit about yourself. We prefer to work with students who have completed our course and understand how we operate our business so you get the first chance!

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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!

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ATO Tax Refunds – Get Your Tax Return in Early

Lodge your tax return early and you're bound to get a quick refund.
Lodge your tax return early and you’re bound to get a quick refund.

We’re always updating our course content to ensure our MYOB course reflect the market demands of bookkeepers in an ever-changing industry, and if you’re one of our MYOB lifetime students you have access to this content any time, every time.

And we use this blog to keep you up-to-date with industry news — like this news just in from the ATO:

A total of 1.7 million returns were received by the ATO between 1 July and 23 July 2013, and already refunds have been issued for some 40 percent of those returns—a whopping $1.68 billion refunded in less than 30 days. Continue reading ATO Tax Refunds – Get Your Tax Return in Early

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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.
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

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Payroll Advice: The Role of the Payroll Professional

There's a lot of aspects to payroll.
Sometimes the importance of payroll is underestimated.

When the national minimum wage increased this month, it got us thinking about the role the payroll professional plays in a business. Payroll is an important and often complex aspect of every business — and a topic we cover in our MYOB training course — but it’s often the most underestimated. So we decided to take a deeper look at the role of the payroll professional.

Payroll: There’s Quite a Lot to It

Even though payroll sounds easy enough — you just pay people their wages, right? — it’s actually not as simple as it sounds. As a payroll professional, you’re entirely responsible for understanding and interpreting the ever-changing regulations and legislation relating to payroll; as well as managing the demands of both the employer and employee.

And as such, payroll is not a simple task for the uninitiated; it requires a person with solid knowledge of PAYG and superannuation, as well as an understanding of Australian tax.

For instance, how do you ensure you’re making the correct contributions to an employee’s HECS or HELP debt? Or make sure super contributions are made correctly (and to the correct fund)? Are you certain your employees are being paid according to the correct modern award? Getting these things wrong is not just time-consuming to rectify, but can also incur fines to your company!

In a recent new book by Tracey Angwin called The Payroll Revolution (which has gone on to become an Australian best seller) Angwin discusses the responsibility of the payroll professional and offers practical and guided tips on Australian payroll.

Just some of the skills that Angwin suggests the payroll professional should possess are:

  • Strong people skills
  • AIS/payroll software experience (such as MYOB)
  • General email, word and excel skills
  • Strong understanding of superannuation and PAYG
  • Good knowledge of the Fairwork Act
  • Ability to work under pressure and to tight deadlines
  • Strong mathematical skills
  • Strong problem solving skills.

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We cover the technical side of payroll in our MYOB training course; the Australian Payroll Association website can also give you more information on payroll practices. We also highly recommend The Payroll Revolution.