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Want to be a teleworker? The Australian Government wants it too

Telework-work from homeSince we closed our Sydney-based training centres in Dee Why, Gordon and Parramatta in 2006 and went 100% online we’ve been able to offer more for a lower price.

For the same price we use to charge for a one day training course in MYOB we are now able to offer ALL 5 MYOB training courses AND provide lifetime course access (INCLUDING updated course content).

You might also recall that our online support team comprises remote workers who operate their own virtual assistant business from all over Australia and even internationally so we are thrilled to be part of the new revolution in remote workers.

We are also very proud to be a Partner of the Australian Government Telework week in the SME (Small Business Sector) and look forward to helping more and more students find work as well as run their own businesses from their own homes.

Remember that we even offer the opportunity to start your own online training business using our established infrastructure AND if you are looking to start your own business as a bookkeeper (or any business for that matter) we now have the Cert IV in Small Business Management on our Learning System.

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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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If You Don’t Try, You’ll Never Learn: FAILING Helps You Learn

Don't beat yourself up if you get it wrong - all the while you're learning from your mistakes - which is a darn site better than never having tried at all.
Don’t beat yourself up if you get it wrong – all the while you’re learning from your mistakes – which is a darn site better than never having tried at all.

We’ve talked previously about cheating and what’s to be lost by students who cheat, and in particular, what a person has to lose from cheating. Not only do you miss out on learning, you also lose out on the valuable experience of sharing the learning process with others. We believe this is such an important part of the learning experience that we’re even in the process of creating an online community for the students of our MYOB, Word, Excel, and WordPress training courses.

Studying Online? You Can Still Share with Others

When you study online it can sometimes be a lonely business. But we want to change all that, and encourage our students to interact and connect with each other; to share their tips and advice, and make the most of the learning experience.

For people who decide to cheat in their coursework, it’s usually for one reason: they don’t want to fail. But realistically, from the moment they decide to copy someone else’s work, they’ve already failed, but without the valuable experience that comes from trying something and failing: learning.

So you take a test and you get a couple of the answers wrong; at least now you know where you went wrong. It gives you an opportunity to go back over your coursework and try and learn that portion again — or even ask someone.

If you were taking one of our online training courses and you were stuck on a particular portion of the coursework or you got an answer wrong in the test, you can contact someone in the EzyLearn team to help you, or you could discuss the problem with your fellow students, and see how they tackled that question.

Developing the Skill of ‘Problem Solving’

But the important thing is that you’re problem solving; you’re taking steps to resolve a problem. And those problem-solving skills that you employ when you reach a bump in the learning road are invaluable when you operate your own business.

As a business owner you need to be able to problem solve, often on a daily basis. When you reach a problem in your coursework that you’re having difficulty with, by asking questions and talking with others, you’re building up your problem-solving skills, in addition to learning how overcome that particular problem, itself.

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So don’t forget: if you don’t try, you’ll never learn. As business owners, we should exercise our problem-solving muscles from time-to-time, so start now while you’re studying a training course.

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PAID Learning Versus FREE: Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained

If something is free it can lose its value, prompting some students to cheat when given free courses.
If something is free it can lose its value, prompting some students to cheat when given free courses.

In a previous blog we talked about cheating and employing a cheater and how it can be easy to cheat in your coursework by plagiarising someone else’s work. We all know that people who cheat are really only doing themselves a disservice because they haven’t learned the coursework. That’s a big reason why we include tests at the end of each module in our MYOB training courses — to test our students’ knowledge of the coursework, like bank reconciliation.

Testing to Help Learn Properly

We don’t believe our students are cheaters, or that a test will stop someone from cheating (people always find ways to subvert the system if they really want to), but we do believe that it encourages people to really learn and understand the coursework in order to complete the test successfully.

These are the kinds of employees that companies and business owners are looking for and we try to ensure we give our students the opportunity to be the best and most successful they can be.

Free Business Courses for Unemployed Job Seekers

This raised another question for us about the kinds of courses available and the kinds of students they attract. You may already be aware that the Australian Government offers unemployed job seekers the opportunity to complete a business course for free.

This is certainly a great opportunity for those job seekers who, through no fault of their own, found themselves without work, and maybe even without the necessary skills to find gainful employment again. So the Australian Government offering courses to help people learn and develop the skills they need to re-enter the workforce is a great thing.

But in life, there are always those people who are willing to subvert the system. If these people didn’t exist, there’d be no war, we’d have no need for a police force, or a government — John Lennon’s Imagine would, effectively, have come true.

Cheating the System

But the truth is, people do try and subvert the system, everyday. Just recently we met a person who had completed a small business course, which was paid for by the government, and they told us how they had devised a plan to cheat in the coursework. Not only that, they also convinced their other classmates to do the same.

So each person copied content off the internet, or another person’s assignment, and submitted it as their own work. This defied the whole point of setting an assignment, which is to get the student to apply the work they’ve learned in class and demonstrate their understanding of it. By cheating, you’ve demonstrated nothing other than your knowledge of the copy and paste function on your computer.

Learning to Interpret Things

You’ve also missed out on a valuable opportunity to take the coursework and apply it to something yourself, and then receive feedback from a teacher. These are generally exercises that you’ll face in the real world as a business owner, and the point of taking a course is to prepare you for those situations and give you the knowledge you need to handle them. A key aspect of learning is to take in the facts your presented with and interpret them yourself.

The Problem with ‘Free’

Perhaps the reason those students who cheated were willing to do so was because they hadn’t paid for the course out of their own pocket. It was free, so what was the harm?

Steven Levitt and Stephen J Dubner are the authors of the hugely successful book Freakanomics. In the book they explore the hidden side of everything, which they say all comes back to economics because humans respond to incentives — and we’re presented with different incentives virtually everywhere we look.

For instance, there are numerous ways you are incentivised to be a good driver: you don’t get speeding tickets, you won’t lose points off your license, and your insurance company will give you a no-claim bonus. And those incentives each come with their own economic reward.

A person who cheats in a course they didn’t pay for doesn’t really stand to lose anything in economic terms — it didn’t cost them anything to attend the course in the first place, so if they don’t learn anything, they’re no better or worse off.

The Positives of Paying

For a person who paid to attend a course, however, they do have something to lose if they don’t learn anything — the money they paid for the course — and this is their incentive to work hard and make the most of the course; to get more bang for buck.

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That’s why we offer lifetime access in our MYOB training courses. We know you want to make the most of the coursework, to ensure you’re getting the most value for your money and that you’re going to work harder, as a result. For that reason, alone, that’s what makes you more likely to succeed than those people who had a free ride — because you’ve got something to lose.

We all like something for nothing, but sometimes it comes at a cost. In this instance, there is a lot of truth to the expression, nothing ventured, nothing gained. If you don’t put up the money in the first place, you’ve got no incentive to gain anything as a result.

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EzyLearn Enrolment Vouchers: The Perfect On-Sell for Your Customers Who Would Benefit from MYOB Training!

EzyLearn enrolment vouchers: perfect for on-selling to your clients who would benefit from MYOB training.
EzyLearn enrolment vouchers: perfect for on-selling to your clients who would benefit from MYOB training.

As Australia’s largest provider of online MYOB training courses, we work with people who are looking to start their own bookkeeping business, find a bookkeeping job and even people who just want to learn how to manage the books for their own business. But did you know we also offer enrolment vouchers?

Who’s A Perfect Candidate for our Enrolment Vouchers?

We sell enrolment vouchers to training organisations and accountants who want to be able to provide their customers and clients with the option of taking an MYOB training course. Our enrolment vouchers are offered at a discounted price when purchased in bulk.

Other Training Organisations

A typical scenario might be a training organisation which buys enrolment vouchers because they don’t offer a MYOB course but think it would be of benefit to some of their students. In this instance, they can purchase vouchers from us, which they can then on-sell to any interested students.

Accountants

For accountants with clients who want to be able to do their own bookkeeping, they can also purchase enrolment vouchers from us and on-sell them to their clients.

Each voucher is valid for 12 months from the date that the training organisation or accountant purchases them, giving you 12 months to sell them to your clients and customers, who also get a further twelve months to use the voucher.

For more information, including pricing, please feel free to contact the EzyLearn team, who’ll be able to answer any of your questions.

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Is Zoho the Small Business Solution?

Check out the numerous Zoho apps for small business.
Check out the numerous Zoho apps for small business.

It’s fair to say the MYOB is the undisputed market leader in accounting software. Even despite the number of new cloud-based software packages that have sprung up in recent years, MYOB is still the software of choice for most accounts and it’s why we offer MYOB training courses. But for someone starting a new business, MYOB might not actually be the must-have accounting software; there’s a new player in town, offering turnkey solutions for small businesses: Zoho Office Suite.

Cloud-Based Zoho for Small Business

Gone are the days of needing several different, rather expensive, software packages installed on your PC; with Zoho Office Suite you don’t even need one. Entirely cloud-based, the Zoho offering is broken down into three app packages: Zoho Business Apps, Zoho Collaboration Apps and Zoho Productivity Apps.

The Many Zoho Apps

Zoho Business Apps includes CRM, books, invoicing software and a website builder, along with other more ingenious tools such as, the support app for managing your customer service, a custom app-builder tool and a recruitment app that allows you to collect resumes and schedule interviews with candidates.

Zoho Collaboration Apps includes a project management app, a social network app called, Pulse, along with chat, mail and docs apps.

Zoho Productivity Apps features a number of word processing apps, including Writer, Sheet (like Excel), Show (like PowerPoint), Notebook, and a Calendar app.

Select a package and a plan that suits your business needs, pay a small monthly fee, and your business has access to each of the apps within that package whenever and wherever they’re needed. The downside: there’s no pricing plan for all three packages, bundled together.

Zoho Books

But say you don’t want all that anyway; you just want some decent invoicing or bookkeeping software. No worries — each Zoho app is available separately. Zoho Books, which is the closest thing to MYOB and offers unlimited invoicing, expense tracking, reconciliation, time tracking, multi currency support, and the newly added automatic bank feeds and credit card feeds feature, costs only $USD24 per month and includes access for two users.

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For new businesses, Zoho is certainly an affordable option, whether you only sign up for Zoho books, or whether you take on an entire business, collaboration or productivity apps package. For bookkeepers, however, MYOB is still the preferred accounting package. That means training in MYOB is still as necessary and vital a skill as ever.

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Would You Employ A Cheater?

would you cheat in a small business courseWhen you choose to study an online MYOB training course with EzyLearn, you learn every aspect of the MYOB software and how it applies to real-life business and accounting situations. Then, at the end of each module, you complete a test to prove to yourself (and your future employer, even) your knowledge of each module of MYOB, such as payroll, for instance.

There are many people who will argue that tests aren’t necessary; that they’re just an exercise in testing how well you can store lots of information in your short-term memory, then forget it afterwards. They advocate, instead, that you’re marked on how well you performed on your overall coursework, and do away with exams altogether.

[quote]But the thing about an exam is that the better you know your coursework, the better you’ll perform.[/quote]

An exam is designed to taken be taken under pressure. They’re testing your knowledge of things that you are likely to encounter in your day-to-day, and may require you to act immediately. They’re not testing you on something that should be considered at length.

Even though EzyLearn offers lifetime access to our MYOB and Excel training courses, we still expect—in fact, we require it—that our students will pass each test at the end of each of the course modules.

There are a couple of reasons for this:

  1. The first, and this is probably the main reason, is that if you decide to, you can pay an additional fee to receive a certificate that shows you’ve completed and passed our online training courses. This can then be used to show potential employers that you actually know what you’re doing in MYOB—which for many accountants and bookkeepers is either a deal breaker or a deal maker.
  2. But an exam also forces you to study the coursework, whether it’s arbitrarily just to pass the test or thoroughly to make sure you understand and perform well in the test—and this largely depends on your own personal code of ethics. Even if you haven’t done a scrap of coursework before you go to complete a test, the mere fact that you have to complete and pass a test to progress through the course forces you to review the coursework.

It’s easy to cheat in any course by plagiarising someone else’s work. In the academic world, the ramifications involve being awarded an instant fail; in business, it usually involves legal action. But a person’s inclination to cheat and plagiarise someone else’s work raises other ethical questions that those respective punishments don’t address.

Cert IV in Small Business ManagementI recently attended a networking event and spoke with someone who had completed a Cert IV in Small Business Management at a local BEC (Business Enterprise Centre)- they had completed a Government funded course and used the excuse of having to do the course as quick as they could so they could start their own business. The problem was that this person “encouraged” many of the students to work together (which is a good thing), but they ended up handing in the same assignment and in some situations forgot to change the name on their assignment!

Working together in a group is a fantastic way to learn because everyone has their own strengths and the really smart students can often be good teachers for the slow learners, but to simply replicate another persons work and not even use your own writing style and interpretation is very sad. It’s particularly sad when the Small Business Management course is designed to help you create an individual business plan for your own specific business.

[quote]Our assessors mark every assignment and provide individual feedback to ensure you properly examine your new startup business.[/quote]

This brings us to whether or not you would feel comfortable employing someone who had willfully cheated in a training course. Personally, we wouldn’t. Aside from that person displaying very little work ethic (they couldn’t be bothered to do the work themselves, so cheated instead), it also makes us wonder whether they would behave unethically in other ways—would they take our client base and start-up a rival business?

This is why we test our students at the end of each module, and only those students who receive a passing grade do, in fact, pass the course. It’s not because we think our students will cheat; it’s because we want our students to really learn and understand the coursework, so they can excel and succeed in business.

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Do you need the MYOB software to do our MYOB courses?

Free MYOB test drive software
Free MYOB test drive software

A common question we are asked about our MYOB courses is if you need to have the software on your computer to do the course. The good news is that MYOB offer a free version of their software for students and trials, it’s called the MYOB Test Drive.

You could do most of the MYOB courses without using the software because we have over 170 MYOB training videos (covering BOTH MYOB version 19 and earlier AND MYOB version 11 and newer – all for the one price). You can also test your skills using our MYOB course knowledge reviews, but there is no substitute for actually using the software as you learn. The biggest thing it will give you is the confidence to say “I’ve done that using the software”.

Our MYOB training workbooks include step-by-step exercises that enable you to perform most of the tasks that are performed at a business so you’ll definitely need to have the software for that. But many students like to replicate what they see in the training videos.

[quote]You can pause the MYOB videos and have a go at replicating it using the free student MYOB software.[/quote]

If you are looking for bookkeeping or accounting jobs you will almost always be asked about your MYOB skills and nothing gives you more confidence than actually using the software.

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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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BAS News Flash: BAS Agents Can Now Lodge TPARs

If you're a registered BAS agent you just became a whole lot more valuable to your clients!
If you’re a registered BAS agent you just became a whole lot more valuable to your clients!

BAS agents can further specialise in the construction industry

WE LIKE TO KEEP our online cloud accounting course graduates up to date with changes to the bookkeeping industry and today is no exception!

If you’re a registered BAS agent working in the building and construction industry, then we’ve got some major news for you: the Tax Practitioners Board (TPB) announced in July that BAS agents can now lodge Taxable Payments Annual Reports (TPAR).

Making more money as a bookkeeper

In an earlier blog, we talked about how you can improve the rate you earn by specialising.  Carving out a niche for yourself — for instance, honing your skills in a particular sector, like the building industry, with all its complexities — will also see you able to earn top dollar (this is exactly what the professionals at Buildon Bookkeeping do).

Taxable Payments Annual Reports (TPAR’s)

Before you can register with the TPB as a Tax/BAS agent, you’ll first need to work under the supervision of another Tax/BAS agent. If you are planning to work in the building and construction industry, you might consider working under the supervision of a Tax/BAS agent providing bookkeeping services within the industry already — so you can get a handle on lodging TPARs.

TPARs are an annual report outlining every payment made to suppliers and contractors for that financial year. Every entity or business within the building and construction industry must now prepare one.

When TPARs first came into effect in July last year, only tax agents were able to prepare the report, but on 15 July 2013, the TPB announced that BAS agents could now provide this service, which must be lodged by the 21July every year.

But wait, there’s more! The TPB has also amended the Tax Agents Services Act (2009) to allow BAS agents to provide the following services:

  • Superannuation Guarantee Contribution and Superannuation Guarantee Charge work
  • Superannuation Contribution payment and reporting services

As the Institute of Certified Bookkeepers understands it, BAS agents will not have to become registered with the TPB to provide these services, even though they were typically services carried out by a Tax agent.

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If you’re a registered BAS agent, you just become a whole lot more valuable to your clients, particularly if you work within the building and construction industry.

If you’re still unsure about the services you can now provide your clients, see the Institute of Certified Bookkeepers website, and for more information on lodging TPARs, click here.


 

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Don’t Stress: Start a Home-Based Business

Are you happy in the workplace or would you be happier working for yourself?
Are you happy in the workplace or would you be happier working for yourself?

In a previous post we gave you five reasons to start a business and work from home. In fact, taking the plunge to embark on your own business is something we refer to a lot at EzyLearn, but for good reason — being happy.

Often we forget just how incredibly important this is, but if you’re not happy at work, it will impact your home life and your health.

Being happy at work is one of the reasons we’re so passionate about helping people start their own business through our online training courses. Continue reading Don’t Stress: Start a Home-Based Business