All eyes will be on the announcement from the Reserve Bank Governor today to see what is happening with interest rates. If you are like most people your cashflow would have been affected in the years since Covid because of the increasing interest rates.
There has never been a more important time to master your household budget and spending than now and good knowledge of Microsoft Excel will give you these skills.
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:
You don’t pay capital gains tax on a property you live in, but
You can’t claim the interest component of your loan
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).
Bigger payments reduce the interest paid
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.
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 highs,
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.
50% OFF the normal price for Microsoft Office courses
There have been some big changes in Intuit QuickBooks Online navigation that have given our course development team the nudge to create updated training material.
All current students and members can access this material at no extra cost – that’s our Updates and Additions Policy.
Some of the biggest changes relate to Customers and leads and that makes sense when you consider that Intuit now owns Mailchimp – one of the largest email marketing service providers in the world.
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?
In the United States most colleges have a Career Academy attached to their education services with the goal to provide extra services that help their students.
The Career Academy Addons that are available after completing an Office Admin or Bookkeeping Course with EzyLearn can be viewed here and the most popular option is to extend course access and support.
When I operated training centres in Sydney most of the sales were made by phone. We’d advertise our course in the local paper, highlighting our phone number and encouraging students to call and enrol into a course. It was labour intensive and not that secure when you think that we were taking down students credit card details over the phone.
Then we introduced learning on demand where students could learn any topic they wanted during our opening hours and we introduced our first online form to take enrolments – the results were miraculous. We’ve subsequently made many changes to that form since then.
We didn’t have to be in the office to take enrolments, students could enrol whenever they were ready and we had a central database of all our students and the courses they enrolled into. Best still, this information was all emailed automatically into our Customer Service software system. You can now learn these skills in the Microsoft Forms Course.
It’s been an interesting year for employers as they grapple with the changes to Single Touch Payroll. Even the major software companies (Xero springs to mind) have taken longer than expected to implement changes.
I was speaking with a cafe/restaurant owner in the Central Coast recently who was trying to implement Deputy (for staff roster and scheduling) with Xero and was having trouble with the STP Phase 2 component. She mentioned that the issue appeared to be with Deputy but I did some research using ChatGPT and this is what the Artificial Intelligence software told me!
Xero led the way in online cloud accounting software that enables anyone to access their accounting software from anywhere. This means that small business owners, staff and their bookkeeping advisors can all access different parts of the software at anytime to perform their work. A far cry from the clunky way that MYOB AccountRight managed multiple users in an office environment a decade ago.
This amazing flexibility enables contract bookkeepers to perform credit control and end of month bank reconciliation tasks working from home, will office support staff are working on quotes, invoices and payments to suppliers. All of these transactions can add up very quickly and soon you can have hundreds of transactions. What if you had to find something, fix something that was entered incorrectly? That’s when you need an audit trail.
Xero just announced Payroll History and it’s designed to keep track of what happens with your payroll records.
One of Australia’s most popular small business accounting software has upped its pricing again, but with no new major added features for users (like when they included Hubdoc features in a previous hike).
Xero has announced that from September 1, 2022, three of its plans will increase in price, with the smallest increase at $2/month through to a $14/month hike.
So why are Xero prices increasing and what does it mean for users? Xero has some pretty expensive recent purchases, and their share price is still declining, so could this spell financial troubles for Xero?
One of the more time-consuming and tricky parts of catchup bookkeeping is reconciling your bank account and bank statement – which means going between your accounting software and bank.
In software like MYOB, even if you use bank feeds to import your transactions into your accounting software, you still need to make sure these match your bank’s records.
But what if your accounting software got the information directly from your bank daily? With ANZ in talks to buy MYOB, here’s what you need to know about where banking and accounting software meet:
The ‘Best Xero Course in Australia’?! That’s a pretty big claim. You might be wondering how EzyLearn can attach this line to our Xero courses, and what actually makes our courses the best?
Well, it’s not just because EzyLearn has over 25 years’ experience in developing training content and helping students achieve their goals. And it isn’t just the feedback we’ve been getting from our course graduates about how their course helped them find work, upskill, and gain confidence.
EzyLearn’s market research helps us to see what people are looking for in a course, what other business offer, and what pricing is best. But what is market research, and how does it lead to our Xero courses being the best in Australia? Here’s what you need to know:
Buy now pay later (BNPL) services are growing in popularity for many retailers. If you’ve been in store recently, or even online shopping as you go to click ‘proceed to checkout’, you might have noticed a poster or button that advertises how you can pay for your purchase in easy instalments.
Afterpay and PayPal are just two companies that provide BNPL options for customers. We’ve started to make all our MYOB, Xero and Excel courses available on PayPal’s Buy Now Pay Later platform: PayPal Pay in 4
The best part is that you can use the discount coupons to reduce the price of each course and then pay it on instalments!
The Australian government launched STP in 2016, where employers with over 9 employees must report their payroll information for each pay run to the ATO. When the ATO introduced STP Phase 2 earlier this year, some of the reporting obligations changed.
Here’s what you need to know about STP Phase 2 reporting in Xero, and how EzyLearn’s got you covered with the training.
Do you provide your employees with gym memberships or concert tickets? Or maybe you work for a company that provides you with a vehicle or accommodation? There are lots of perks that business can provide to their employees outside of salaries and wages – and these are called fringe benefits and they may apply to you if you worked at home due to COVID-19.
FBT is not as simple as handing out freebies. Employers have to pay tax on these benefits they provide, and the amount can depend on the type of fringe benefit they’re providing.
We’ve written before about how fringe benefits tax is important to consider when you engage a new worker, but let’s look more in-depth into what fringe benefits are all about, and how to ensure you comply with your liabilities:
Invoices can be a hassle for both businesses and their clients. There’s nothing fun about chasing up that client about their late payment, nor is it an efficient use of time to trawl through emails and inboxes trying to find that invoice from however long ago.
The Commonwealth Government is pushing ahead with an alternative, that looks like it will make things a bit easier for everyone.
eInvoicing is on the rise! And since software like Xero has jumped in on the change, it’s important for small businesses to know what eInvoicing is all about:
Intuit (the maker of QuickBooks, an online accounting software for small-businesses) has recently announced a new purchase that could see them breaking into the ERP world of business software. Mailchimp is now owned by Intuit!
Xero has recently announced its updated product features, and they include improvements to integrations, interfaces, and information.
We updates our Xero Training Course content regularly and every student gets 12 months course access and support – this includes access to all updated and additional course content. Here’s a rundown of recent changes Xero have made to their software.
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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…
