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I was looking for quotes for end of lease cleaning recently and started sending emails and Facebook messages when one of the replies I received directed me to their online form – very smart!
Rather than ask me questions and wait for replies and sending 10 messages to find out basic information this cleaning company had it all laid out on their online form.
The best part of this is that I had to do all the data entry work and my details went straight into their database and email system!
You’ll get enough information from the financial reports to advise Jerry how to make future decisions for his business – particularly when it relates to cashflow, credit management and purchases.
In The Next Quarter Bookkeeping Course case study we look at Jerry’s financial reports and start to keep better track of income vs expenditure as well as better ways to use his money (like buying assets vs paying off loans).
Jerry will also have the knowledge to make product and services decisions because he’ll know what is selling well and where he is making more profit.
In The Next Quarter we look at how his business gets discovered online and what other digital marketing options are available to him.
We explore whether he should continue to use a project bidding site like HiPages or focus on getting more traffic to his own website.
Ultimately, no matter which digital marketing medium you use you’ll want to strengthen your sales skills to learn how to identify ideal clients and turn them into customers. At the same time you’ll want to learn how to help clients who are not ideal.
Cashflow is critical for the survival of a business. It’s like the blood pumping through the veins or the air going into and out of the lungs and without enough positive cashflow you don’t have a business that can survive.
People often ask “How long does it take to complete a Business Activity Statement” but there are several different correct answers to that question.
If all your transactions are entered correctly in your accounting software and your bank account is reconciled the BAS Lodgement takes a matter of minutes.
The hard work is often completed by bookkeepers who do the daily data entry or the catchup bookkeeping to make sure all the data is captured. This task can take days or even weeks!
If you want to save money you can lodge your BAS yourself and use our BAS Course workbooks to learn how to do it.
Advanced Xero Training with the BAS Course Workbooks
The tricky part of lodging Business Activity Statements is making sure you get the correct tax codes for GST transactions and payroll. If you get these codes wrong you could end up paying less tax to the ATO than you are supposed to or even underpay your staff.
The difference between a BAS Agent and a junior bookkeeper is the compliance requirements to make sure they get it right. A BAS Agent has a duty of care to ensure that the correct tax codes are used and the Cert IV in Bookkeeping and BAS Agent skillset courses (which are Nationally Accredited) take students through the legal framework around compliance.
When a Registered BAS Agent provides these services as a contract bookkeeper they are providing a BAS Service and that is administered by the Tax Practitioners Board.
A BAS Agent is trained but more importantly insured to ensure they get the information 100% correct – otherwise they can be sued. That means they have to have Professional Indemnity insurance to provide BAS Services to clients.
You don’t need to complete a Cert IV in most circumstances
In most circumstances where you are completing the BAS as an employee you will be working under the supervision and direction of the business owner, business manager or the bookkeeper or accountant for that business.
Students who enrol into our BAS Courses simply want to know how to perform these tasks using accounting programs like QuickBooks, MYOB and Xero.
You don’t need to subscribe to expensive accounting software like Xero if you only have one or two staff members. Business owners have been processing payroll manually for years and these basics are taught in our BAS Course with the Ad hoc payroll spreadsheet.
I was speaking with a hairdressing salon owner last year and she mentioned that she uses the manual weekly pay tables provided by the ATO and a spreadsheet program to pay all her staff.
We use these pay tables to introduce students to the foundation concepts about payroll.
Every business owner collects GST and taxes on behalf of the ATO from the money they pay their staff. This money is a liability payable to the ATO as part of their quarterly or monthly Business Activity Statements.
As part of the BAS Course you’ll be introduced to the process to enter payroll transactions as journal entries.
This advanced level online payroll management course will help you learn the necessary skills and enter the payroll sector as a Payroll Officer using all the modern online accounting programs.
Learn about the tasks performed by payroll officers and develop in-depth payroll knowledge and receive your payroll certification on completion.
Learn Payroll Officer tasks for hair dressing salon and cafe and restaurant industries
What does a Payroll Officer do?
Payroll Officers are responsible for processing payroll, tax calculations and deductions. This can include creating and modifying the roster and making note of days off and sick days.
They also prepare monthly, quarterly and year-end financial statements when working with the company accountant or payroll administrator. In small businesses this role may also include elements of accounts payable and other bookkeeping responsibilities.
Payroll gets advanced when you start going a little deeper into the lives of your employees.
Younger staff members under 18 are often keen and willing to learn but also get paid much less. Older workers and parents might be more flexible but may come with obligations to pay child support payments which need to be deducted from their pay.
The issue of rostering, changing shifts and sick days also fill up a lot of time for payroll officers and these tasks and the obligations around them are taught in the Advanced Payroll course case study.
Hiring and firing is a normal part of running a business and although it can be challenging you need to get these steps right. They’ve covered in the Advanced Payroll course case study.
Do forms frustrate you? I’ve come to learn that forms are critical to organise and systemise a business. They’re an orderly way to collect relevant information for the different admin tasks of a business.
Without forms you’ll have a messy filing system or an Inbox that is so full of confusing information that you’ll spend half your time just looking for thing!
Different uses for online forms
We use forms for tasks like:
Enrolling into an online course
Customer feedback
Online course enquiries
Surveys
Free training course samples
Requesting a certificate
Joining one of our Career Academy services
When you think about forms the concept is pretty simple really – you just use a program like Microsoft Word to create a form and then hand it to your clients to fill in, right? WRONG
Most forms are completed online these days so you need a specialist form builder that enables you to collect the information from anywhere (usually your website).
Online form builder benefits
Using online forms in your business means you don’t need to do the data entry, your customers do. This makes the information accurate and takes away unnecessary work for your staff – and that is called productivity. It also makes it easier to get that information into other software programs used in your business.
Xero became a massively successful bookkeeping program because of the hundreds of software programs that integrate with it. Learn about some of the popular Xero integrations. Integrations enable information to be shared between different software programs.
Using an Online Form Builder enables you to do the same with information that is collected using your form.
Microsoft Forms is an online form builder that enables you to
create forms for anything,
embed them into your website and then
enable support and admin staff to access this information from anywhere.
I’ve been reviewing our Payroll courses and the practical case studies included in them and thought I’d take the opportunity to share some details about it with you.
The advanced payroll training course topic uses some typical payroll scenarios that go above and beyond the basic payroll tasks in a small business.
Payroll can get messy when it comes down to
employment awards,
deductions,
HECS repayments and
other obligations that employers have
In Australia small businesses are agents of the Australian Taxation Office. They act on behalf of the ATO to collect taxes and pay superannuation relating to their employees and these transactions are entered in their bookkeeping systems as liabilities until they are paid.
Just follow the step-by-step instructions to enter the transactions based on our small business case studies and increase confidence and knowledge of the software.
This is a quick and cheap way to learn and by-pass the assessments.
Are you finding work quiet this time of year? We’ve just been handed down our budget and emails are starting to fly around showing what it means to us.
Its the time of year where we find out how well we’ve done financially. It’s the time of year where workers will see how much they can borrow to buy property in the 2025 financial year and where they need to cut back.
Most of this financial information will be worked out using Microsoft Excel.
It’s been a bit chilly after the Australian Federal Budget and the stretch to the end of the year seems like miles away, but it’s not.
If you want to learn how to use Microsoft Excel and Xero with the full course and support, including Training Course Manuals but are on a tight budget, take advantage of our Micro Courses for Micro credentials.
Micro Courses in Excel, MYOB and Xero are now available at a discounted retail price.
Most people like to watch some videos about how to use Xero or Excel and then try to replicated it.
This works well when exercise files are provided to help you practice. This is particularly important when you get into the Intermediate Excel training where you learn skills like formatting and formulas.
Things are moving fast in the software industry as Intuit (QuickBooks), MYOB and Xero compete with each other with regular software updates. It has become so fierce that many students are enrolling into our Bookkeeping Academy Combination courses.
The key frontiers are still
automated data entry from bank feeds,
capturing receipts and extracting data,
faster reconciliation and
automatic calculations of taxes owed.
These are some of the features promoted by NAB Bookkeeper for NAB Business banking customers but what is MYOB’s huge announcement?
The most common jobs for office admin and office support require confident knowledge of Microsoft Office and MYOB or Xero for bookkeeping tasks.
The office admin role is the person that connects most of the other business roles, including
customer service,
sales and
accounts.
This means you’ll be speaking to existing clients about the administration tasks involved in their purchase, while also coordinating with other employee of the business to help complete the services.
In the building and trades industry you’ll be helping with paperwork relating to their building project.
Office admin jobs require good communications skills because you may not know the answer to all your clients questions but you are the first person they speak with. You’ll need to correspond with other parts of the business to ensure that the client has the information they need.
This can include scheduling meetings, allocating meeting rooms and reminding clients and technicians about appointments, most of which is done using Microsoft Outlook.
This role can get even trickier when you are also the person following up for payment! You may need to be nice and friendly to maintain a good client relationship while also being stern and enforcing the business credit management policies.
If your employer supplies complex solutions which involve project management and many different milestones one of your first tasks will be to collect information about the customer needs from the sales person and provide them with a quote or tender that is created by an experienced estimator.
Your role might be to convert complex information into a glossy brochure or proposal that makes it easier for the client to understand.
If you are preparing this information for a sales person to present you may also need to condense it into a slideshow presentation using Microsoft PowerPoint.
Difference between Office Admin and Business Admin
If you want to climb up the ladder where you work or find a higher paying office admin job you should explore some of the requirements for business administration jobs. This previous blog posts explores actual job ads and requirements for staff.
I want to thank the following students for choosing EzyLearn and graduating from their Office Admin and Bookkeeping short courses.
At this point we don’t speak with some students again because they have the new skills they want and they use them to find work or do better in their jobs. That is a sad part of the training business for me.
Some students take advantage of our Career Academy services and stay around to get exposure to employers and other students.
There are many finance professionals — who does your business need?
Does your business need a bookkeeper, accountant or perhaps just a BAS agent – or a little bit of everyone?
WE’VE MENTIONED PREVIOUSLY THAT finding a bookkeeper, when you may not know much about bookkeeping, can be a difficult task.
In fact, a lot of new business owners assume their accountant will take care of everything for them, which may be costly if their accountant has to perform a year’s worth of bookkeeping in order to file the business’s tax return. But bookkeepers and accountants can work harmoniously in your business.
As a general rule, every business needs at least two finance professionals working on their business accounts, but which two professionals you’ll need to hire depends on your business needs. If you’re not sure who you need to hire for your business, here’s a cheat sheet to help you out.
Bookkeepers (not registered with the TPB)
An independent bookkeeper not employed by an accountant and not registered with the Tax Practitioner’s Board (TPB) may only perform basic bookkeeping services, such as the
entering of receipts,
coding financial transactions,
generating invoices and purchase orders
accounts receivable and accounts payable
If you hire this type of bookkeeper, you’ll still need an accountant.
BAS agents
BAS agents must, by law, register with the Tax Practitioner’s Board (TPB), which certifies that they are qualified and have completed the necessary continuing education requirements to perform the tasks of a BAS agent, which involves carrying out most of the bookkeeping tasks mentioned above, in addition to preparing and lodging business activity statements on a business’s behalf.
If your business is registered for GST, you will need to file regular activity statements. If you hire a BAS agent, you’ll also need an accountant. In some instances, you may find a BAS agent who’s also a registered tax agent and vice versa, who may be able to take care of all your taxation needs.
Tax agents
Although tax agents, like BAS agents, must also register with the Tax Practitioner’s Board (TPB), a tax agent is focused on income tax — how much income you have to declare, how much you can claim back, etc.
This is distinct from a BAS agent who is concerned with the day-to-day financial tasks of your business (bookkeeping and BAS lodgements). That said, some tax agents will also perform some the basic bookkeeping tasks on a regular basis, though they primarily specialise in lodging tax returns.
If you’re not registered for GST, and your tax agent will also perform regular bookkeeping tasks (or you can do it yourself), you may not need to hire an accountant. In some instances, you may find a tax agent who’s also a registered BAS agent and vice versa, who may be able to take care of all your taxation needs.
Accountants
An accountant is mostly concerned with planning and strategy. Unlike bookkeepers and BAS or tax agents, an accountant will assess and advise you on what actions you should take to maximise your income. Great accountants will get involved with planning the direction of your business and ensure it’s been structured properly and that you’re meeting any additional tax obligations.
They’ll also help you to make strategic purchases for equipment and machinery, and work with your BAS agent or bookkeeper to ensure these decisions are reflected in your daily financial records. An accountant is also able to prepare and lodge tax returns on your behalf.
How much should I pay a bookkeeper?
Check out the National Bookkeeping Directory, which features the details of bookkeepers, capable of doing data entry and clerical tasks, through to high-level accounting work as undertaken by BAS agents, accountants and CFOs.
You can also see the National Bookkeeping rates page to find out what level bookkeeper your business needs.
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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…
