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Quickbooks is gaining traction in the Australian marketplace.
I’m a fan of QuickBooks as the functionality is excellent and the cost of the software is still low. I’m really pleased to announce that you can now enrol in our QuickBooks Online Daily Transactions Course — but does QuickBooks fulfil Australian legal obligations to be SuperStream compliant?
The background is that from July 1 this year, all Australian businesses with fewer than 20 employees were required, by law, to be SuperStream compliant.
SuperStream is a government initiative to improve the efficiency of Australia’s superannuation system, namely by making superannuation a totally electronic process.
Most cloud-accounting packages that have been developed for the Australian market (such as major applications, like MYOB, Xero, Reckon and so forth, but not smaller apps like Zoho or QuickBooks, which can be used in Australia but don’t interface well with Australian tax procedures) are now all SuperStream compliant, with one exception: QuickBooks. Continue reading QuickBooks Isn’t SuperStream Compliant, But It Doesn’t Matter!
We’re coming to a rather frantic yet very exciting end to the 2016 calendar year with a whole bunch of new course announcements coming — the first of which is the creation of our QuickBooks Online Daily Transactions Course! It’s currently only $50 so hurry up and enrol now to enrol at this price — it’ll go up soon as we develop new content to beef it up!
I written a lot about Quickbooks Online since Intuit, a MASSIVE accounting software company in the US, started to promote itself directly in Australia after breaking up with Reckon, their local distributor. And why did this happen? Because of the power of cloud accounting for software companies to deal direct with the customer!
Why a New QuickBooks Online Training Course?
Our QuickBooks Online Daily Transactions Course is the result of comparisons we’ve made between the accounting software programs and the belief that this software will start to take a larger chunk of the accounting software market in Australia — if for only one reason: the cost for the software is very low and remains low while they try to win market share. The functionality of QuickBooks is excellent, and as far as navigating and “user experience”, it is far easier and less clunky than having to install a software program on your computer, like you need to do with MYOB!
At EzyLearn we use each of these main accounting software programs (MYOB, Xero and Quickbooks) and for me, personally, QuickBooks is the pick of the bunch!
— Steve Slisar, Managing Director, EzyLearn
Our course has been created by highly qualified professionals — in this instance, Tracey, our registered BAS agent and Helen, a qualified accountant, so you can feel confident the information is covered thoroughly and precisely. You can view our course prices and enrol now to take advantage of the great price on this new course.
If you’re looking to improve your current skills set or you’d simply like to learn a new one, visit our website for a full list of our training courses and details on how to enrol. If you enrol in any of our MYOB, WordPress or Excel online training courses, you’ll receive Lifetime Membership to our course materials. This means you can stay up-to-date with each new version of software that’s released for no additional cost! What’s stopping you? Enrol today!
FINDING PROSPECTS AND converting them into clients involves selling and most of us hate doing it, but wait…
For those of us in small business, be it as a bookkeeper, real estate agent, sales rep, virtual assistant or the like, most of us are selling every day of our lives.
This means we get pretty good at it. We develop techniques that we can replicate and that become part of our daily lives.
The process of selling is really no longer about selling per se; it becomes about a systemised process of:
Finding it hard to get started in content marketing? Register for our upcoming course.
The beginning of a new year, which is typically the quietest as people take a while to adjust to the work and school routine, is when a lot of business owners spend time setting goals for the year ahead.
Just as individuals set their own personal new year’s resolutions, many business owners use January to set some new year’s resolutions for their business’s marketing activities.
Here are the Digital Marketing tasks that staff can do to bring more inquiries and more sales:
Business blogging vs paid Google Ads or Facebook Ads
When it Comes to Your Career, Hopping Around is OK
Those who hop may be the most successful, career speaking.
For many years, young people, particularly Generation Y, were cautioned about changing their jobs too often — or being a “job hopper”. It would give the impression they were flaky or disloyal or unable to commit, they were told,
You want to find a job where you can stay there for at least 10 years, where you can grow and progress through the company.
There are lots of services available that, for a fee, will register your business name, company structure, domain name, email hosting, and even register your business for GST and PAYG. But do you really need to use these services? Well, it depends.
It doesn’t matter whether you have a specifically online business, or a gift shop, clothing store, cafe or other bricks and mortar business, as a business owner, we can help you understand the digital economy.
In a post I published about starting your own business, I said that all small business owners should have an understanding of traditional and digital marketing. You’ll be surprised how many don’t!
Be Aware of the Ebbs and Flows of Your Business: Multi-Period Profit and Loss Reporting
Nearly every business has its busy periods and its quiet ones. Crucial to the success of a business is knowing when these busy periods and quiet ones occur, so you can capitalise on them.
For a lot of Australian businesses offering professional services, December through January is usually when business winds down for the year. In the hospitality and accommodation industry, however, it’s typically the busiest time of the year, so planning for increased business is essential. Continue reading Running Multi-Period Profit and Loss Statements
What To Do So You Don’t Lose Money When Doing Your BAS – 6 steps
If your business is registered for GST, it means you have to file regular activity statements with the ATO, usually each quarter. A lot of business owners export their Business Activity Statement (BAS) data straight from their accounting software, like MYOB or QuickBooks, and quickly prepare their BAS’ that way. But this is an imprecise method, and one that could be costing you money.
Do You Have to Drop a Client Because of a Bad Credit Check?
It’s only business: but sometimes a bad credit rating doesn’t mean you have to end the working relationship.
A Credit Check is one of the most important first steps of good credit and debt management but you can still do business if the check comes back negative.
In a previous post on credit and debt management, I recommended that all businesses — regardless of whether they offer credit to customers on a 30-day account or not — perform a credit check on any new client who will spend more than $1000 on goods or services in one sale, on an ongoing basis.
What should you do if the credit check comes back negative, and shows that the potential customer is guilty of late payments, pending legal action or already carries a significant level of debt?Continue reading What if a Credit Check Comes Back Negative?
It’s Good Business to Set Out Your Credit Management Policy at the Outset
CRITICAL TO THE SUCCESS OF ANY BUSINESS is the ability to maintain a healthy cash flow. But doing so requires effective credit management processes.
Unfortunately, too many business owners feel uncomfortable talking about credit and debt management upfront with new clients.
They (falsely) believe it begins if, and when, a customer doesn’t pay a bill. But, in fact, credit management starts much, much earlier than that — long before the two businesses even agree to work with each other, to be precise. Continue reading Is Credit Management Just About Getting on the Phone?
We’ve had several hundred bookkeepers Pre-Qualify for our National Bookkeeping, Bookkeeper Directory and most of them upload a resume demonstrating their qualifications, experience and references but I’m baffled at how bad the formatting is in these resumes!
To help our students do the best job presenting themselves on paper we’re including the Microsoft Word Course for free when you enrol into either the MYOB Courses or Microsoft Excel Courses (when you choose the all courses and 12 months access with Certificate option). That’s a saving of $267!
The problem with making mistakes with your Microsoft Word formatting is that questions could come up in an interview. The Interviewer might throw in a question about software skills, particularly if you’ll be writing some detailed reports or proposals, forecasts etc. in the new job.
Click the image to see our current special offers!
Here are some extra tips for Bookkeeper resumes
Most of the Microsoft Word skills you need to write a good resume are covered in our Word Intermediate Courses, but we’re including the entire 9 courses so you can become a power Microsoft Word user! Here are a couple other things to think about when writing you resume:
Include an image – it makes you stand out and brings the reader closer (make it a selfie where you’re smiling 🙂
Include your full name and desired role in the filename (we’re all using files these days! use it to your advantage)
The last one about filenames is a big one because if interviewers are like me they’ll put all the resumes for one role into a folder and I find myself renaming most of them!
FREE Microsoft Word Workbook
We spend a lot of time on marketing so I assume that you know we offer free samples of our training material, but I should mention again that the Microsoft Word sample is actually the entire Word Beginners Course 201 Training Workbook, make sure you get it! Get it now.
Quickbooks Course Update
It’s been a while in the making, but we have the final draft of our Quickbooks Course workbook! Unlike some training companies, we write up a detailed course story based on a real business scenario and use that as the basis for recording our screen videos that demonstrate how to use the software. We’ve had a huge number of Course Alert Registrations and they’ll ALL receive a free copy of the workbook, so if you haven’t already registered do it NOW!
EzyLearn Wholesale Partner Update
I made a brief reference to our new Enrolment Voucher system in a recent post about BAS deadlines and we’ve got an update. The new enrolment voucher system is now in beta testing which means we’ll shortly be inviting EzyLearn students who love our courses to receive a massive wholesale discount on selected courses. Make sure you register your interest.
I’ve always believed that as soon as you offer credit you’ve got yourself another business – a credit management business.
When we first created our MYOB Daily Transactions course we designed it to take students through the cashflow process of where money goes when it first leaves your bank account and these are the main steps:
Money in the bank (cash asset)
Buy stock (inventory asset)
Products sold on account (accounts receivable asset – Trade Debtors)
Customer pays their account (cash asset)
The interesting part of this business process to me is the marketing (choosing the products, pricing, marketing message and advertising) and the credit management to get the money back.
It’s that crazy time when the end of financial year TAX and quarterly BAS periods combine to cause compliance anxiety for business owners and managers if they don’t have a handle on their bookkeeping processes and accounts. This is often caused by not having the best team available for all the tasks required and I spent some time during the week speaking with Tracey our MYOB, Xero and Quickbooks Trainer from Rockingham in WA about the different levels of bookkeepers and whether they could complete tasks relating to a BAS Service. Here’s some of the information that I thought you’d find useful.
Getting receipts as evidence
The biggest issue that many bookkeepers experience is getting information from business owners, particularly small businesses that are stretched between:
the work they need to do every day
Keeping and filing the financial records like receipts
Getting the financial records to a bookkeeper or accountant
I’ve written in the past about the ways that small businesses file their receipts as well as cloud technology like Shoeboxed (who now seem to prefer selling their services to accountants and bookkeepers and have removed the educational video that demonstrated how the software works!), but Quickbooks Online has a downloadable app that enables business owners to capture a photo of each receipt for each transaction and if business owners utilise this function they can save a lot of money in data entry and evidence of expenses that could be expected as part of a BAS audit by a BAS agent.
BAS Audits, red flags and tricky GST codes
I’ve mentioned in a previous blog that you can hire a cheap bookkeeper to take care of your data entry and only use the services of a more expensive bookkeeper (ie. BAS agent) for purposes of confirmation of expenses and the GST components of these expenses. In this case a simple BAS audit involves witnessing these source documents to confirm that there is no error in calculating the money owed to the ATO. If you’ve had any of the following transactions you’ll probably need to pay close attention to the information in your BAS lodgement and mention them to your bookkeeper:
Purchasing a motor vehicle
Motor vehicle expenses
Real property purchase
Any purchase coded as a GST-Free transaction
Low value purchases (under $82.50) that are coded as GST free
I’ve written a lot about bank feeds in the past and included a blog post about how bank feeds work in MYOB and Xero. Bank feeds can be a real time saver because they automatically bring your bank transaction records into your accounting software, but Tracey mentioned that in MYOB you should bring them in BEFORE you do any reconciliation tasks otherwise you may need to undo any reconciliation work you’ve already done so watch out for that!
Need One-to-One training or a QuickFix on MYOB, Xero or Quickbooks?
We did a lot of one-to-one training when we operated our physical training centres in Sydney and the training was often completed at our training centre (because we had it!). Now I’m thrilled to advise that we’re helping local bookkeepers in your area deliver MYOB and Xero training according to our profession course structures! To learn more visit the National Bookkeeping training page. You’ll also discover that our bookkeepers area also available to fix problems or lack of knowledge with the QuickFix service so check that out.
Coming up..
Here is what we are currently working on and what will soon be published or made available at our LMS.
Guide to Credit Management (aspects of a business and your accounting software where you can tighten your credit management processes). We’re creating this guide in conjunction with the local bookkeeper at National Bookkeeping
Xero Course training material update (workbooks and videos are being updated and added as we speak so stay tuned for more announcements soon
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Xero is a great bookkeeping program for tradies who are on the go and using their phones (or a tablet) all the time. From receipts scanning to creating quotes and invoices, receiving payments and keeping track of project costs.
bookkeepercourse.com.au/produ…
It’s that crazy time when the end of financial year TAX and quarterly BAS periods combine to cause compliance anxiety for business owners and managers if they don’t have a handle on their bookkeeping processes and accounts. This is often caused by not having the best team available for all the tasks required and I spent some time during the week speaking with Tracey our 
