GANTT CHARTS ARE just one of the many wonderful features Microsoft Excel and help enormously in the workplace.
Many project managers oversee the project management and implementation of, say, a staff induction system, a new computer system or procedural changes.
Our Online Excel Training Course includes training on how to create your own project plan using Gantt charts. Continue reading Microsoft Excel 2016 & Gantt Charts for Your New Website/Business/Project
With these software programs you can run most aspects of a business and we’re including them all in our new Corporate Training Business Software Training Licences for businesses with a team of people who all want to improve their software skills.
Our Business Software Training Licence enables up to 5 staff members have unlimited access to all training resources for all of our software training courses for 12 months for a low fixed cost. We also have discount prices for larger numbers of staff.
If you look at the total retail price for all of this it is well over $6,000 of value in online corporate training courses and at the current price you’ll only pay less than 25% of the price. That is a saving of over 75%!
In 2015 we experienced a significant increase in the number of corporate enrolments for our Microsoft Office courses and have created this package to make life easier for corporate who want to enrol their staff easier, while also taking advantage of the discounted prices.
If you are looking to up-skill in a number of accounting software or office application programs you’ll also discover some discounted course combination offers for popular courses.
[button link=”http://ezylearnonline.com.au/how-it-works/special-offers/” newwindow=”yes”] See our Special Offers[/button]
Earlier this year, the TPB changed the requirements of the tax and BAS agent registration renewal process, now making it essential for all BAS and tax agents to participate in some form of education under its new continuing professional education (CPE) requirement.
According to the TPB, tax agents must participate in a minimum of 90 hours of CPE over the standard three year registration period, while BAS agents must participate in a minimum of 45 hours over the standard three year registration period. The Institute of Certified Bookkeepers have enabled completion of our Microsoft Excel Training Courses be accepted for CPD points.
As you’ve probably guessed, for your study to be recognised by the TPB and go towards your CPE registration requirement, the study has to relate to your area of work as a BAS or tax agent. While a short course on DIY home maintenance wouldn’t be covered, a seminar conducted by a qualified accountant who specialises in the building industry would be recognised by the TPB, even if it’s being led by a colleague at the firm where the BAS agent works.
The TPB has specified a number of activities that they consider relevant to tax advice, BAS and tax agent service you may provide:
The second-to-last activity included in that list, you may have noticed, accepts any relevant activity provided by a recognised professional organisation. There are quite a few professional organisations recognised by the TPB, as you can see on their website, but the one probably most relevant to bookkeepers is the Institute of Certified Bookkeepers (ICB), with which EzyLearn is also a training partner.
The ICB is an association established to support bookkeepers and BAS agents by regularly holding seminars and training workshops, giving members access to marketing materials – such as customisable e-newsletter templates and unique email addresses – listings on the ICB directory and IT support, among many other things. Because they’re also accredited with the TPB and recognised by the ATO, they also possess a fair bit of influence with both organisations, making the lives of its members much easier.
In this case, being a member of the ICB, gives you access to a number of TPB-certified continuing professional education courses, seminars, lectures and workshops that can be counted as part of your CPE quota; members can also access a CPE register within the ICB dashboard to record their CPE activities.
As a member of the ICB, you’re able to take any of the courses that they consider relevant to your profession as a bookkeeper and BAS agent, and which they consider to be continuing your professional education. This would include any of our MYOB or Xero training courses, but would also include our Excel and Word training courses as they’re both used to assist you in doing your job as a bookkeeper and BAS agent.
If you’re a BAS agent and your registration with the TPB will come due on or after July 1, 2016, you will be required to have participated in CPE to be eligible for renewal.
Joining the ICB and taking advantage of the many free and discounted seminars, workshops and courses, like one of our online training courses in MYOB, Xero, MS Excel or Word, is a good way to ensure you remain compliant with the TPB’s tax and BAS agent registration terms.
To find out more about joining the ICB, visit their website. Alternatively, if you’d like to learn more about starting your own bookkeeping business or working as a home-based bookkeeper, subscribe to our blog for all the latest news and updates delivered straight to your inbox.
A mortgage for your home is a huge debt, particularly for those living in the swelling capital cities with soaring house prices. The pro and cons of buying your own house and living in it are:
The big problem with this is the interest charge – you can’t claim the cost of it yet it’s a massive component of each and every payment you make on your mortgage. You’d need your house price to go up at least at the interest rate you are paying to make it a good investment – and right now you’d be doing fine (perhaps except in Perth now).
Our Microsoft Excel Training Course now includes an Excel spreadsheet file that will help you see just how much money you’d save if you paid even a small amount off extra each month!
You can use the mortgage comparison file to compare two mortgages, make extra payments or even shorten the term of the loan to see how much you’d need to pay each month if you want to pay your mortgage off quicker.
If you are an existing Excel Course student you’ll find the new file at the end of our Microsoft Excel Advanced Course 309.
I don’t want to turn this into a financial education blog, but there are several reasons to open this spreadsheet and start seeing the resulting figures to workout the best way to allocate the money you earn. Interest rates are at record lows, house prices ‘may’ be peaking, some people say that Australian banks are so highly leveraged to the residential property market that they’ll need to hold more capital reserves.
Either way you look at it, why not use your Microsoft Excel skills and play with some calculations to see how much better off you could be if you are financially prudent now. You can also use this Microsoft Excel file to do a stress test and see how much your mortgage would be if interest rates do go up as many people expect they will.
Free Microsoft Word Course (or Xero Accounting) when you enrol in Excel Certificate CourseNote that if you enrol into Microsoft Excel Courses and choose the certificate option you’ll receive a BONUS course in either Microsoft Word (to create a professional resume) or Xero Accounting! Read our BONUS course offer announcement.
It’s been a surprising year this year for our Xero Training Courses. Xero must be doing something right with their marketing and strategy because we’ve seen a significant increase in the number of students enrolling for this course.
I was just speaking with one of our students only recently and she mentioned that of all the software programs she uses (and she uses them all) that Xero makes bookkeeping so easy that some of her clients who’ve gone onto it have reduced the number of hours that they employ her!
[quote]It’s a scary thought if you are an independent contractor who doesn’t have a professional services agreement in place for regular work with their clients, but it’s also a sign of the times for bookkeepers in the cloud (online) software era.[/quote]
The biggest reason for the ease of use? Bank Feeds. See below for our free Xero course offer..
I recently wrote about content marketing and whether a bookkeeper is someone who can discuss or even recommend this service to the people they work for. The best way to think about this is how the bookkeeper role works in many companies, for example, do small businesses look for a bookkeeper who can provide a wider range of services than just bookkeeping? It’s common for a bookkeeper to work in the administration areas of a small business because finance and administration go hand in hand and it’s common for contractors who understand cloud based services to delve into and explore other cloud based services.
I was speaking to another bookkeeper who is a Registered BAS Agent about her website and online marketing and she was telling me about all these fantastic things she was doing to promote her own business.
[quote]After talking to her for an hour I started thinking that she is a good person to talk to about Internet marketing – and that perhaps she starts offering these services to her clients too![/quote]
In the end it often depends on the size of a bookkeepers clients and the type of work they want to do. When you develop your bookkeeping and accounting skills you become more valuable as an accounts contact, particularly as a Registered BAS Agent, however you can become more of a small business administrator if you are aware of how to manage many different parts of the business.
Sorry, I digress.
[box type=”tick” size=”large” style=”rounded” border=”full”]What I really wanted to announce was our new fantastic special offer of a free Xero course or Microsoft Word course when you enrol into a Microsoft Excel or MYOB Training Course with EzyLearn.[/box]
Xero is great to know if you want to delve deeper into the various software programs available to do bookkeeping (and a great tool to offer if you want to operate a bookkeeping business from home). Microsoft Word is a great program to master if you want to create documents for yourself or the business you work for and the tool of choice for creating a great resume so you can get that next job you’re going for.
Most students know about us because of our online MYOB Training Courses (5 courses for the price of 1) but we have a fantastic offer for Microsoft Excel Training Courses where we include every course from Excel Beginners, Excel Intermediate and Excel Advanced for one low price.
We create our own courses so we have the perfect combination of:
Our Microsoft Excel Training Courses will teach you about ALL of these uses for Microsoft Excel and provide you with dozens of files to learn, practise and even use in your own home or business.
[quote]Charts or Graphs are visual tools that can make mundane data interesting and useful to demonstrate patterns.[/quote]
Excel charts are based on data that is entered into a worksheet but can also be produced from more advanced tools like Pivot tables.
Charts are introduced in our Microsoft Excel Beginners Courses, along with worksheets and databases and it is covered in more detail in the Intermediate Microsoft Excel Training Courses AND in the Advanced Microsoft Excel Training Courses that include pivot tables.
[box type=”tick” size=”large” style=”rounded” border=”full”]We even include the example of how we used enrolment data from 2003-2004 to find out the best time of the day and day of the week to offer our class-based Microsoft Excel Training Courses when we had our Sydney Training Centre in Dee Why.[/box]
One of the fantastic things about operating an online training business is we can give students as much access as they need even LIFETIME course access. We can do this because we use a LMS (Learning Management System) called Moodle that is used by well regarded universities around the world (as well as many more humble training organisations like ours.
When we operated a class-based training centre we offered students free repeats so they could refresh their Microsoft Excel skills if they didn’t use the software for a while after their course – now we can offer unlimited access to all courses for 12 months or LIFETIME access.
A skills assessment is the normal procedure a HR manager puts their employees through to understand how much their staff know and where they need to improve. It’s also the assessment that students used to go through with us over the phone when they had to decide between the different skill levels of courses (Beginners, Intermediate or Advanced), but because we include EVERYTHING in our online course there is no need to perform a skills assessment.
You can bone up on any Excel basics, reinforce your existing skills and hone some new skills because all courses are included when you enrol into Microsoft Excel with EzyLearn!
Learn more about what is included in our Microsoft Excel Course Outline and see our Enrolment page for detailed pricing and course options.
[button link=”http://ezylearnonline.com.au/courses/microsoft-excel/”]Microsoft Excel Training Courses[/button] [button link=”http://ezylearnonline.com.au/enrol/” bg_color=”#038a20″]Enrolment Prices and Options[/button]
When I started my blog more than 5 years ago, I felt a bit like a computer nerd. I mean, who wanted to read about how to do bookkeeping and accounting using MYOB?
Incidently, the big fight to become the most successful Cloud Accounting Software is now well underway with MYOB having just been relisted on the ASX and its share pricing diving very quickly.
They’re competing with Xero and we wrote about the fierce competition looming against MYOB in 2010 when Craig Winkler (the man who build MYOB into the success it become now being a significant shareholder in Xero).
Bookkeeping became exciting, in large part, because of the flexibility it offered busy people wanting more control over their working lives, and busy parents trying to juggle priorities.
We could create a content marketing strategy about how cloud accounting makes bookkeeping faster and easier for small business, while also making it possible for parents to work closer to home (or at the family home), performing bookkeeping tasks and avoiding traffic, congestion and time you never get back commuting.
I should also confess that, at the time, I didn’t realise how important AND time consuming content marketing would be. Every blog post takes at least an hour!
You may ask how what appears to be a relatively simple blog post can take that long? In reality, a well researched blog post, including topic research, finding images, finding the right page(s) to link to can take several hours and that’s what we’re going to share in our soon-to-be-launched Content Marketing Course & Services.
If it were the case of just writing some sentences, it wouldn’t take that long at all. But what’s the point of that?
I’m not going to insult people, particularly people who have proven that they take the time to read my blogs on a regular basis, with poor quality, rushed content.
Furthermore, everything I write relates to something else we do and it involves:
I haven’t even mentioned the time and effort in optimising each and EVERY blog post for the keywords that are important to us. That involves:
Tempting isn’t it? The thought that you can get someone to write a great blog post for your business for $2-3 per hour!
I mean in one day you could get all your writing done and then just schedule the blog posts to be published in something like your WordPress Blog over the next month or two. But it’s not that easy it is?
We are in an age where just stringing some words and sentences together isn’t going to get any one to pay much attention, particularly if there is a hint of broken English or disconnect with the topic. And anyway, if you’re going to write content you need to be an expert don’t you? Who wants to read some words that have just been sprayed onto a page because they have relevant keywords?
Like many tasks involved in small business, the most important part of the work is creating the Content Marketing Strategy; the plan for:
Some of these components have nothing to do with the intended reader, but if your content marketing is going to be effective you’ll have to have a clear description of your reader in your head — I like to give them a name, imagine how many children they have, where they live, why they’re using my products/services, who their friends are, how they are going to talk about our company etc.
A wise old business owner I use to speak with regularly kept asking me the question, “Who is your customer, Steve?” This relates to everything. It relates to content marketing, but it also relates to when our courses are available, how we combine several features into one offer, how we try to do more for that market, like find other ways for them to benefit by using our service, hence National Bookkeeping!
Most of our online training students use our services for MYOB Training Courses, Excel Training Courses, Xero Courses and Small Business Management Training.
For most people it’s because they’re looking for bookkeeping work or want to start a bookkeeping business. Finding out as much as possible about why our students do our courses enables us to develop products (and write content about) what they need.
We partner with a bookkeeping directory which is aimed at helping people (our students primarily) find bookkeeping work or start a bookkeeping business. It’s also a great way for small businesses to find bookkeepers who are close to them.
Find out how you can promote your bookkeeping services to a much wider circle of people by engaging in content marketing.
One of the best ways of learning how to use a program is to use that program during your training. Some people can sit with programs like Microsoft Excel and learn by trying something out and making mistakes and then trying again.
[box type=”tick”]We’ve discovered that Microsoft Excel course students want to work with real world files in a logical step-by-step method that uses the exercise files for the basic skills and then keep using that file for the more advanced skills.[/box]
By the end you’ll have a powerful Microsoft Excel spreadsheet using advanced skills and because you learnt in a logical and methodical way, using gradually more complicated tools, you’ll have learnt most of the Microsoft Excel skills you’ve wanted and won’t even notice the time go by.
The main uses for Microsoft Excel are as a:
Here are some of the ways that we use Microsoft Excel for our training business.
In Microsoft Excel Course 303 we look at formulas and formatting and one exercise file we share with students and an example of what’s possible using Excel is the artwork we created for the newspaper ads for our courses at our training centres in Sydney. The table structure of Excel enables us to lay the information out precisely and if we need to change the dates
Yes, you can see the costs of running a business in a simple table, but when you put it in a chart you can visually see the differences in costs and in our 305 course on charting we’ll show you how to create the various different types of pie, line and bar charts as well as many other types. You’ll learn how to format the charts to make certain areas stand out and you’ll learn how to demonstrate trends.
It’s great when you have historical information to work with because you can spend a lot of time working out percentages, margins, budgets etc to try to figure out how you will go in the future. We include many exercise files in Microsoft Excel Course 306, including files to help you:
When we operated our training centres in Sydney we spent a lot of our time scheduling courses. We had to allocate training rooms, roster on our great trainers, print training materials and we needed to know when people where coming to courses. We discovered that most people who wanted to learn Microsoft Excel did a night class. We had these variables to work with:
By discovering the best days and times that students had enrolled into courses from the past we were able to better schedule our courses to get the most students. It means we didn’t need to cancel courses.
See the contents of Microsoft Excel Course 308 for more information.
In a business you can build a bigger business and make more profit by
Using Goal Seek in Microsoft Excel we discovered something that’ll help all independent contractors run a better more profitable business.
