Posted on March 15, 2012March 13, 2012 by Steve Slisar — 1 Comment

Live Excel Pivot-Table Stats: self-paced learning versus class-based training

Want to see some live data from when we operated our Sydney-based training centre? We conducted courses for Absolute Beginners (we call it Computer Learners now), Microsoft Word and Excel, MYOB Accounting software for bookkeeping and others. We also offered different start times and different methods of delivery including self-paced (which has evolved into online) as well as class-based training courses.

The data in this free Microsoft Excel training video is taken from our student enrolment database the same year we created our first training videos. We created these videos to make them available to students who couldn’t fit into a schedule or wanted a more personalised training experience. Want to learn more about my fond journey in computer training? Feel free to also subscribe to my small business blog while you are at that site.

If you are reading this as an email, click on the heading to get to our blog site and enjoy the free training video about Pivot Tables using Microsoft Excel (the exercise file is provided in our Excel Training Course) and shows live data of enrolments for that year. We used a pivot table to find out:

The popular courses,
The popular training methods
The popular start times for courses.

Can you see in the video which year the data is from? Back then we had experienced trainer like Maria Landrelli and Marie Diblasio to deliver our popular MYOB Day-to-Day courses to find work as a bookkeeper.

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Posted on March 14, 2012March 13, 2012 by Steve Slisar — 1 Comment

New Macros in Excel Course to handle prepayments

We are please to announce that our most advanced Microsoft Excel course (course 309) now includes a training exercise on Macros!

You may recall we asked the question as to whether it is better to give a discount and accept prepayments or to charge your normal price and chase invoices and statements? Well, we got our Microsoft Excel expert to create a simple table that enables us to keep track of prepayments as well as incremental reductions from this prepayment.

This file is a great tool to keep track of how much credit a customer has if you decide to invoice them in advance. There is a way of accepting prepayments in MYOB and our MYOB expert and resident BAS Agent is currently putting a guide together on how to handle prepayments using MYOB. Using Excel can be a handy replacement for using MYOB in this one aspect of your business.

Best of all, Karen created a short guide that we have added to the 309 course training manual which explains how to replicate what she created. Both the Workbook and the demonstration file that Karen created are now at the learning site.

Posted on March 2, 2012February 28, 2012 by Steve Slisar — 1 Comment

Can MYOB repay it’s debts with its head in the clouds?

We wrote back in early 2010 about what appeared to be a revolutionary move at the time about MYOB founder Craig Winkler jumping ship and moving to Xero. In the recent bad press about the bug-ridden upgrade of MYOB AccountRight 2011 there is an interesting mention about Cloud Based accounting and MYOB’s goals to get into that space.

In the past 12 months we have worked with as well as provided training for many virtual assistants (remote contractors) and we’ve come into contact with other cloud-based accounting/bookkeeping services you might like to know about. Our pick of the bunch would have to be SAASU at this stage because they have a product that is perfect for remote contractors or micro businesses.

It appears that Xero and SAASU own the online accounting market space but it will be interesting to see how MYOB go as they diversify into cloud accounting as well as their many other products like website hosting, which we’ve never really understood when there are market leaders like MelbourneIT and NetRegistry as well as thousands of small providers.

While we’re on the topic of cloud, here’s a little plug for virion business grade voip. Our trainers have compiled an Excel spreadsheet to demonstrate the cost savings of VoIP over traditional telephony and this year we will have some training for IT Consultants about the Siemens Gigaset office phones.

Posted on March 1, 2012February 28, 2012 by Steve Slisar

Is it better to repay your debts or prepay with discounts?

The recent bad news about MYOB AccountRight 2011 demonstrates the risks involved when you borrow money for any venture (MYOB have a $575M loan that they need to repay). The money needs to be paid back and luckily you can use MYOB software to keep track of what is owed to you. It also brings up the question of rather than having a debt to repay can you pre sell what you do (at a large discount)?

We are asked many questions in our MYOB online training course support service we call “EzyLearn ANSWERS” and one of the recent questions was “what is the best way of keeping track of Prepayments”. We took the question to our Registered BAS Agent and MYOB Tutor as well as our Microsoft Excel Expert and we’ve come up with two scenarios, one using MYOB and one using Microsoft Excel.

What is the best solution?

You could use MYOB to handle pre-payments, or you could use it as a simple track of the lump sum payment you’ve received into your bank account and use Excel to enter the day to day information about how and when that prepayment is used.

We’ve created an Excel “Handy file” for you and we’ve putting the finishing touches on the workbook that explains how to do it using both Excel and MYOB so stay tuned to this blog or subscribe to receive these blog posts via email as they are published.

Need something created in Excel? Enrol into the online Microsoft Excel course and use EzyLearn ANSWERS to put it to our Excel guru.

Posted on February 29, 2012February 28, 2012 by Steve Slisar — 3 Comments

Accountants now refusing to recommend MYOB

As part of our commitment to create new training content every quarter for our online MYOB training course we’ve added some addendums to the bank reconciliation and payroll courses in line with the latest version of MYOB AccountRight Plus available. Many Accountants however are not recommending that their clients make the upgrade.

We received some complaints from students about issues they experienced with the MYOB Bank Reconciliation and Payroll Intro courses and as a result our Registered BAS Agent and MYOB Tutor, Jacci, went through the course and wrote some notes to help students come up with the correct results.

Just as we suspected after speaking with bookkeepers and accountants it appears there are major flaws with the current version of the software and it’s affecting the revenue of MYOB Professional Partners and Consultants (who are being encouraged not to share the information).

It’s times like these that we are all tested as trainers, installation consultants, bookkeepers etc to be confident that we are doing our best to use the software to provide the information that we need. It’s also a good time to understand the benefits of having alternative ways of working with your data (ie. using a spreadsheet like Microsoft Excel) to perform calculations for PAYG and Superannuation.

Posted on February 21, 2012February 21, 2012 by Steve Slisar

Do you pay yourself but don’t use the Payroll feature of MYOB?

Sometimes we use the EzyLearn Blog to inform readers about general course information. Today we’re announcing a new exercise file that is included in our Microsoft Excel Course 308 (which covers Macros) as well as the MYOB Payroll Course.

If you are a small business owner and you only have yourself or a handful of employees you might come across the dilemma about how to keep a record of payments you’ve made to yourself so that you can pay the correct amount of PAYG, Super etc. If your business is only small you may decide not to purchase and use the full MYOB AccountRight Plus version of MYOB accounting software and opt to keep Payroll records separately or in an Excel spreadsheet.

In a previous post we mentioned that one of our course content creators was working on a spreadsheet to help with PAYG and Super calculations for BAS reporting. Well it’s now ready (AND there’s more to come).

The Excel spreadsheet we have created enables you to enter the total amount that you have paid to an employee (or yourself) and calculates the PAYG and Superannuation that is payable for that amount (you can adjust the superannuation rate). All you have to do now is enter the payment into MYOB and your compliance is assured.

This file is handy if you pay yourself irregularly or differing amounts as you need it. Using this PAYG spreadsheet you simply enter the total amount you’ve paid yourself (or an employee) over the quarter and it finds how much you need to pay in PAYG and Super.

This excel file uses the VLOOKUP command in Microsoft Excel and the tax tables for weekly pay at the ATO website. If you are an existing student you’ll find the exercise file in the Excel 308 course (under the heading Handy Files). This course covers 3D formulas, CHOOSE, VLOOKUP, HLOOKUP, MATCH and INDEX, nested functions and how to protect worksheets.

Did you know that when you enrol into the EzyLearn online Microsoft Excel course that all levels are included for the one price? This also includes access to new content as it is created and you have lifetime access.

Posted on February 13, 2012February 10, 2012 by Steve Slisar — 1 Comment

Statement of formulas for calculating PAYG amounts to be withheld

The MYOB Payroll Training Course is in stage two of development. The contents of our existing Payroll course give students an introduction to how to navigate around and get fundamental information about the payroll environment in the sample company file. As part of our constant improvement process we are developing payroll scenarios as exercises for our students. This new content when published will be available for all existing Payroll Students and all those who have enrolled with the LIFETIME training course Access option.

Which table to use?

The ATO release papers that provide you with the information you need to perform your calculations regarding PAYG, super etc. In this blog post we look at Schedule 1 Pay as you go (PAYG) withholding NAT 1004. If you take a look at table 7 on page (see diagram on this page) you’ll see the variables or what the Australian Tax Office call coefficients.

New Spreadsheet for Excel and MYOB students

One of our content creators is in the process of creating an Excel spreadsheet as a simple tool to help you work out how much PAYG tax and super you owe at the end of quarterly BAS reporting period. It’s a tool that we will offer both Microsoft Excel and MYOB Training Course students when it’s ready. And no, before you think of asking, it won’t cost you any extra money to receive it. It’s available as part of our LIFETIME student access.

Posted on December 23, 2011December 23, 2011 by Steve Slisar — 3 Comments

It’s time to thank YOU

It’s only days before Christmas 2011 and from all of us at EzyLearn HQ we want to thank you for watching our training videos, using our training worbooks and completing our knowledge reviews, reading our blog posts and telling your friends about us. I personally also want to thank the core EzyLearn team for enabling us to grow and provide a great online training solution for thousands of Australian’s and international students.

Thank you Frankie, Yvette, Richard, Jacci, Ross, Amy, Luke, Iroshini, Warren and Allison. Also a big thanks to Simon, Scott, Amy J, Faisal, Jennifer, Nicholas and Mathew. You have made a real difference to EzyLearn this year and to our students and the hard work you’ve done will reward students for years to come.

This year has been one of our best years because we made a commitment to be the best online training company for

MYOB accounting software and bookkeeping
Microsoft Excel & Microsoft Word, and
WordPress website Content management system and blogging platform.

Other training companies spend their time and energy trying to provide hundreds of courses with the aim of trying to get anyone they can. We decided to focus on our core skills and give everything we could. We also tried to make our online training courses affordable and inclusive so you don’t have to worry about your availability or skill level.

Here are some highlights during the year:

Creating a WordPress blog post

Social media has gripped us all this year and if you are a business that didn’t know about websites, blogging, Facebook pages and Twitter you were considered lost. We’ve used WordPress to create our own websites for years and this year we introduced the WordPress Training Course.

You might find it interesting that we were writing blog posts about WordPress back in 2007 and even earlier, but this year we expanded our content significantly and included Google Analytics, Feedburner and other skills in it.

LIFETIME student membership

In January 2011 we introduced lifetime access to our online MYOB Training Course. This gave students access to all courses (Setup, Day-to-Day, Bank Reconciliation, Payroll Introduction) and it also provided them with a safety net and a resource when they are in the workplace. Rather than say thank you and goodbye once our students have completed their online course we welcome students to come back as often as they need.

A significant benefit to this offer is that students get access to all new content that has been created for the course or updated content for the existing material. An excellent example of this is our online Microsoft Excel course. We have training material since 1999 on Excel version 2000, 2003, 2007 and 2010 and as we create new content for Office 365, existing students will have access to the new material for no extra charge.

Welcoming Entrepreneurs as Business Partners

Our Business Partner program has enabled other dedicated professionals to use and promote our training material as part of their own business activities. This has enabled us to focus on the delivery of training materials and management of a learning platform while other business owners earn money by their promotional and sales activities.

We are 100% dedicated to this program going into 2012 so if you are interested please ensure you make contact with us.

Testing your MYOB knowledge and skills

Online training is still relatively new for many prospective students so we introduce the concept of knowledge reviews and skills tests to demonstrate how they are a learning tool as well as a testing tool.

We created a significant volume of new tests and quizzes as part of our online training courses this year and as a demonstration of their efficacy we introduced a free public MYOB skills test to see how much you knew about MYOB. It was also a great way for students to discover a new way of learning something online.

Partnering with Bookkeeping Industry groups

A significant number of our online training students complete their training to perform bookkeeping tasks as an employee or as an independent contractor. To demonstrate our commitment to “would-be” MYOB Bookkeepers and provide you with reputable accredited MYOB courses we became an accredited training provider of the Institute of Certified Bookkeepers. EzyLearn is also a member of the Australian Institute of Training and Development, the Australian Web Industry Association and the International Coaching Federation.

We join these associations to support the online training and coaching industries, demonstrate our commitment to professional industry ready courses and keep abreast of all new training techniques and technology.

More than just an online training course

Support is an important aspect of online learning and it is also a source of significant costs for organisations like EzyLearn. In balancing the costs of maintaining our current team members will the benefits of some rudimentary customisation of our courses we introduced EzyLearn Q&A. With a separate Q&A service for Microsoft Excel, WordPress and MYOB.

We’ve subsequently called this service EzyLearn ANSWERS. It’s a way of providing new training materials based on questions from our students. Students ask questions relating to their needs and our software specialists create a short answer to lead students to a solution. We use this service to increase the breadth of topics covered in our courses.

More team members to serve your needs

This year we added 8 new team members to help create new training content, manage our online learning site, answer questions and provide support. Most importantly it has helped us significantly reduce the time it takes between when you complete your course and when you receive your certificate.

You’ll meet more of these team members during 2012 and we hope to bring more people into EzyLearn to support your learning needs.

Faster loading videos and better online learning tools

We listened to the feedback from our students to improve as much as possible and to complement the addition of new team members we significant upgraded our video hosting capacity to ensure faster and easier viewing and navigation of our online training video tutorials.

This technology update enabled students with new devices like iPads and other Apple products to view our training videos and participate in mobile elearning regardless of their chosen devices.

Training for office administration for small businesses

This year we formed a partnership with virion business grade VoIP to provide online training tools for their installation partners. As part of this project we included some new training materials to help office admin staff not only configure their new VoIP telephone systems, but we also provided spreadsheets for them to use as part of their phone bill analysis reports for customers to demonstrate how much money they could saving using Voice over IP.

We started looking at VoIP solutions for our own business in 2008 when we tried out the features of MyNetFone. In our constant search for better technology and support people we discovered the VoIP solution dedicated to small businesses, virion.

In 2012 we will strengthen this relationship by providing more in-depth training videos and tutorials. Our commitment to online training is focused on providing students with the tools they need to be efficient and productive in small business across Australia as well as provide these small businesses with the tools they need to operate great businesses.

Conclusion

If you think we have made a lot of improvements in 2011, just wait until you see what we have planned for 2012. We will:

create more training content for our MYOB course and WordPress / Webmasters course
implement more services to help support your online learning
help you find more customers (for small business owners using your website and Google adwords, Analytics and SEO)
provide more tools to help you find a job (for job seekers by helping you write better resumes, perform better at interviews and be more confident in your work)

Thanks again for reading and following our progress we want to demonstrate your successes in our 2012 blogs posts.

All the best from the EzyLearn Team.

Sincerely,

Steve Slisar

Posted on November 18, 2011November 11, 2011 by Steve Slisar

MYOB Support Q&A: Entering Employee Payments Manually using Journal Entries

MYOB Support Q&A: Entering Employee Payments Manually using Journal Entries

If you are a micro-business but you’ve want to pay yourself wages for tax reasons you don’t need to buy MYOB AccountRight Plus. You can enter the information into the system using Spend Money and Journal Entries.

The most important aspect of performing the staff payment task is knowing how much money you owe to the employee, the ATO and the employees Superannuation company. We created a simple spreadsheet to calculate the amount of PAYG, Super, and other Levys that are owed when you pay a staff member. This spreadsheet is freely available to all of our Microsoft Excel Course students.

Once you have this information you can take advantage of our MYOB Q&A Guide that we’ve just added to our MYOB online Payroll Course.

Please note that our MYOB Q&A service is designed to take questions from students about specific topics which may not be included in our course. We take these questions to our software specialists and produce a short instructional guide to help you with your real life need using Microsoft Excel, MYOB and WordPress.

If you want to receive regular updates about when this information is released, please subscribe to our EzyLearn Blog.

Posted on November 11, 2011November 11, 2011 by Steve Slisar — 2 Comments

Using Microsoft Excel to calculate Payroll Liabilities like PAYG, Medicare and Super

Excel Training Quick Tip

We recently created an Excel spreadsheet to demonstrate how to calculate the amount of PAYG, Super, Medicare levy and Flood Levy payable by a company for it’s employees based on an employees gross yearly income. It’s an excellent example of using IF STATEMENTS and NESTED IF STATEMENTS.

You can change the gross annual income and watch all the other figures change automatically.

We’ll be using this information in our MYOB Payroll Training Course which will undergo a huge update this quarter. If you are a small business owner you can calculate your PAYG obligations on a spreadsheet and then enter the pay transaction as a journal entry or spend money in your MYOB software.

This Payroll, PAYG, Super excel file is now freely available to students of the Microsoft Excel Online Training Course, just log into Course 306 which covers IF STATEMENTS. Remember if you are an MYOB training course student you can enrol into our Excel training course for a discount. See the Course Outline for MYOB Day-to-Day (existing students only) for the details of how to claim your discount.

Posted on November 10, 2011November 10, 2011 by Steve Slisar

What does EzyLearn have to do with Starfish’s?

If you are into new technology and you like to know what is going on there is one man who write regular blogs from his experiences working with new technology. His name is Seth Godin and he has over 123,000 Twitter followers. Whether you use Twitter or not, this man has a wide influence and many of his very short blogs are inspirational for business owners and anyone who wants to create something.

Seth wrote an article recently about the differences between Starfish and the long tail. If this is all starting to get a little weird don’t worry, these terms are used in Internet marketing circles to describe the business model you are in and we’re mentioning it here because it confirms our commitment to be the best at a handful of online training courses: Microsoft Office (Excel, Word, PowerPoint and Outlook), MYOB Accounting, and WordPress website design and blogging. There are many companies who promote courses online and that’s what they do, promote courses online, we try to be a little different and here’s why:

We offer a handful of courses and do them very well
Our courses come with LIFETIME membership
As a student you get new content without paying extra
Where possible we provide real life exercise files so you can work with the software

We launched the EzyLearn Q&A service as part of this commitment and it’s designed to do two things:

Provide existing students with an opportunity to ask questions about topics that may not be included in our course content
Increase the value of our training courses to students by keeping them current and relevant.

Posted on November 8, 2011November 4, 2011 by Steve Slisar — Leave a comment

Graduation & feedback for Online MYOB Training Course

Graduating Students

We want to send a congratulations to some of our students and their success in our online MYOB training course and all the best for their future using the software for bookkeeping and managing company accounts. If you are seeking new employment we also wish you the best in your searching, resume writing, applications and interviews. Congratulations to:

Katya (ACT), Katayou (NSW), Linda (QLD), Veronika (QLD), Jenny (VIC), Denise (NSW), Natalie (NSW), Jacqueline (WA), Sara (NSW), Gopan (NSW), Matthieu (QLD), Kelly (NSW), Rhonda (QLD), Sarah (WA), Pia (VIC), Wayne (QLD), Geri (WA), Kerry (VIC), Robyn (NSW), Darlene (NSW), Celeste (NSW), Michelle (NSW), Cassandra (VIC), Angela (WA), Erica (WA).

What students say

We also want to share some of the comments that current students have made regarding what they enjoyed most about our course and training material:

“My experience with Ezylearn was great. I am going to recomend your website to all my friends and family members”

Katayoun

“All of the course information and also the knowledge tests”

Geri

“(The best part of the course was) the walk through videos”

Celeste

“The explanations were good”

Gopan

“I thought the course was very thorough and easy to find information especially if I need to review a task… It was very convenient to do the course in my own time when i had available…. and at my own pace”

Veronika

“Having workbooks to supplement the videos and able to practise simple exercises. Also, the opportunity to be able the myob program for free rather than having to buy it”

Michele

“Steve is quite good and makes the video enjoyable and makes it easy for me to learn how to navigate around MYOB”

Linda

“Ease of use. Convenient – study when you feel like it and have the time to do it. The videos are easy to follow even though I was using a (different) version of MYOB than those in the videos. This didn’t seem to matter because differences between them were very basic, and are mostly only aesthetic”

Jenny

“Easy to understand”

Natalie

“Most of the course was good and the support documention is helpful so I can alway go back to it”

Denise

Scheduled Improvements

Don’t worry, we’re not sitting on our laurels just because students have praised our online training courses. There’s also lots of work to be done to make some parts of our courses even better and we want to let you know about them:

New content for the online MYOB training course (including Payroll and Reporting)
More practical Microsoft Excel exercises for things like PAYG and manipulating MYOB reports
Demonstrations on how to perform some calculations in Excel and enter them manually into MYOB
More website measurement statistics for WordPress courses using Google Analytics

Please feel free to send us some suggestions.

Posted on October 5, 2011 by Steve Slisar — Leave a comment

Navigating the EzyLearn Online Training Site

Come on a short journey to learn how to navigate the EzyLearn Online Training website. We’ll take you on a quick tour so you know what to expect as a student when you start your training with us. You’ll see one of the great benefits of joining and having at your disposal a learning resource for the rest of your working life.

Your student administration area enables you to quickly jump from course to course if you wish and the bread-crumb menu at the top gives you complete knowledge of which course you are in and gives you the ability to get back to your home page and course outline.

Take a look at our popular online Courses in MYOB Accounting, Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and WordPress website design and blogging: http://ezylearnonline.com.au/courses/

Here’s the video on how to navigate our training website.

Posted on September 14, 2011September 7, 2011 by Steve Slisar — Leave a comment

EzyLearn Provides Online Microsoft Excel Course for Bookkeepers Institute

As an Accredited Training Provider for the Institute of Certified Bookeepers, we are proud to provide our online Microsoft Excel course to the institute as part of their Professional Development Program.

Along with all levels (beginners to advanced), members of the Institute of Certified Bookkeepers also receive the LIFETIME Membership and other benefits that come with being an EzyLearn student. Microsoft Excel is a perfect companion for accounting programs like MYOB Accounting.

For more information about EzyLearn Online Microsoft Excel course, please visit our Excel course website.

Posted on September 12, 2011September 7, 2011 by Steve Slisar — Leave a comment

Microsoft Excel Online Training Course: LIFETIME Student Access & Start Tomorrow

Common Questions for Computer Courses

Can I repeat the course if I don’t remember everything that is taught?

This was a common question that came up when we had our three Sydney based training centres. To make it easier for students we offered Free Repeats so that students could come back and learn the skills again. We then created training videos to complement our workbooks and in 2006 we closed our last training centre to focus on Online Computer Training Courses.

Can I start the Microsoft Excel course this week? I have Mondays and Wednesdays available.

This is a question about timing scheduling your calendar for an available course and we overcame this by recording the content of our classroom Microsoft Excel and Office training sessions as screen based videos so that students could come and visit whenever THEY had the time, not when WE scheduled the courses.

With Broadband Internet and fantastic new learning technology we are able to delivery Microsoft Excel Training to you via our online course. This means you can enrol today and start by 5pm tomorrow. It also means that you can progress through the training course at your own pace using a combination of training video tutorials, training workbooks with exercise files and knowledge reviews to test your skills.

Who uses EzyLearn for Microsoft Excel Online Training courses?

Government departments, insurance companies, private companies and home users all use EzyLearn Online Computer Training courses. We recently interviewed a corporate training customer to find out why and this Case Study reveals how a leading energy reverse auction company, Energy Action, used EzyLearn’s Microsoft Excel training to manage the large amounts of data they receive to save their customers tens of thousands of dollars in energy costs: Energy Action Case Study

Posted on September 8, 2011September 7, 2011 by Steve Slisar — 1 Comment

EzyLearn’s Excel Course: Helping Energy Action Show Savings in Energy Cost and Consumption

IN THESE TIMES OF GLOBAL WARMING the need for businesses to reduce energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions has never been more important.

Australian company, Energy Action, prides itself on helping businesses reduce energy usage and save money. Energy Action provides an innovative flagship service it terms the ‘Australian Energy Exchange’ through which energy suppliers can competitively bid against one another for the supply of an organisation’s energy. With a best-fit contract usually secured in only 15 minutes, more than 5000 businesses have now partnered with Energy Action to maximise their energy savings, culminating in more than $5 billion worth of energy contracts.

Energy Action provides their clients with quality monthly reports showing clients’ energy demand, power factor, load factor, energy consumption, emissions and more. Their daily monitoring flags when clients’ demand targets are approached or exceeded.

Microsoft Excel Online Course 308 - pivot table value field settings

Read how Energy Action staff learnt about Pivot Tables and Charts, Conditional Formatting, VLOOKUP and much, much more to provide a higher level of knowledge to their customers: Energy Action Case Study

Category: Microsoft Excel training course