At EzyLearn we are always updating our course content and when you enrol you can access lifetime membership for free continued updates.
One of the many reasons we became early champions of MYOB Account Right Live when it was first released — the software you’ll learn to use in our MYOB training course — is because of the bank feeds feature. Take a look at the video below for a demonstration on how to set up bank feeds for a business:
The Beauty of BankLink
For a long time, one of the most tedious aspects of the bookkeeping process was the data entry. For bookkeepers with large clients, who had many expenses and transactions each month, the process of manually entering each of those transactions into MYOB could be the most time-consuming parts of the job.
That was until recently when MYOB added the bank feeds feature to their Account Right Live software by entering into a partnership with BankLink which they eventually acquired in 2013. The bank feeds feature in MYOB is a little piece of computer magic that eliminates all of the tedious data entry by automatically feeding transactions from your bank account right into MYOB.
And it’s not just large organisations with many expenses and transactions each month that can benefit from the bank feeds feature in MYOB. Everyone from sole traders through to large corporations can and should use the bank feeds feature.
Remember, enrol with EzyLearn to learn MYOB and take up our lifetime membership offer to receive continuous, free MYOB updates.
As one of Australia’s largest providers of online MYOB training courses, we’ve come to learn a thing or two about our students’ learning habits and what we’ve discovered is that there are three different kinds of learners — visual learners, auditory learners and kinaesthetic learners.
There’s no right or wrong way of learning, but we thought it would be interesting to have a look at these three learning styles in a little more detail.
Learning … Kinaesthetically
First up: kinaesthetic learners. People with a kinaesthetic learning style learn by touching and doing things, and although they only make up about 5 percent of the population, they’re a group of learners we see a fair bit at EzyLearn. This is because our training courses are software-based and at some point people become pretty eager to give the software they’re learning about a test drive.
Kinaesthetic learners are the students who learn by discovery, can complete more than one task at once and are those students who like to listen to music while they work.
Kinaesthetic learners are likely to:
Need lots of breaks
Speak with their hands and gesture a lot
Learn by working with others
Remember what was done
Learn by doing activities
The benefit of being a kinaesthetic learner and studying with EzyLearn is that you’re able to study at your own pace (so you can take lots of breaks), get hands-on with the software and try some of the exercises, and you can also interact with other students at our student community to get that much-need dose of human interaction.
It is this kind of flexibility that online learning offers that makes it so appealing to a broad range of learning styles that the traditional face-to-face offering often can’t provide.
Not a kinaesthetic learner? See tomorrow’s post on visual learners.
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.
***
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.
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.
The more confident you are in your abilities the less threatened you will feel by the arrival of a newcomer to the workplace.
As part of our MYOB Training Course, we’re constantly adding new content and helping our students win work and improve their employability. That’s why we always emphasise the importance of continuing to educate yourself — for the obvious skills advantages you bring to any company, but also for your own confidence.
For many people, it can be a little nerve racking when new blood enters the workplace and in today’s job market, it’s not at all uncommon to see a new face appear. Sometimes it’s in the form of a new employee there to share your workload and other times it’s because your organisation has employed someone to help restructure the business so they operate more efficiently.
The Many and Varied Threat
For many employees, this new face around the office can make them feel threatened — threatened about the future of their jobs and threatened by the prospect of the office dynamic changing. Fortunately, however, there’s an antidote for this rather common reaction to change: taking a course or continuing professional development.
The thing about feeling threatened is that it’s entirely to do with your confidence. You may feel like you’re not quite as educated or as skilled as this other person and as a result, you think your employer won’t need you any more. The truth is, your employer probably has no intention of letting you go, but nevertheless, the job market is changing and up-skilling to increase your knowledge base is invaluable — to you and your employer.
Confidence in Upskilling and Continuing Professional Development
Aside from the tangible knowledge and experience a highly-skilled employee brings to an organisation, they also bring with them confidence. The more secure you feel with your ability to do your job and do it well, the more confident you’ll feel as a result. For this reason, EzyLearn is a big believer in continuing professional development.
Our MYOB, and Microsoft Word and Excel training courses each come with lifetime access to the course content, so that you can review the course material and even access updated content, whenever you need it.
***
A truly confident person would embrace the idea of working with someone new and potentially learning and sharing knowledge, rather than feeling threatened by them. But the key to achieving this confidence is being able to feel secure in your own knowledge base and that’s what EzyLearn’s Continuing Professional Development Program aims to provide bookkeepers with: knowledge.
So stop worrying, stop feeling threatened, and feel more confident in your skills and knowledge by taking one of our online courses today!
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
Sometimes the importance of payroll is underestimated.
When the national minimum wage increased this month, it got us thinking about the role the payroll professional plays in a business. Payroll is an important and often complex aspect of every business — and a topic we cover in our MYOB training course — but it’s often the most underestimated. So we decided to take a deeper look at the role of the payroll professional.
Payroll: There’s Quite a Lot to It
Even though payroll sounds easy enough — you just pay people their wages, right? — it’s actually not as simple as it sounds. As a payroll professional, you’re entirely responsible for understanding and interpreting the ever-changing regulations and legislation relating to payroll; as well as managing the demands of both the employer and employee.
And as such, payroll is not a simple task for the uninitiated; it requires a person with solid knowledge of PAYG and superannuation, as well as an understanding of Australian tax.
For instance, how do you ensure you’re making the correct contributions to an employee’s HECS or HELP debt? Or make sure super contributions are made correctly (and to the correct fund)? Are you certain your employees are being paid according to the correct modern award? Getting these things wrong is not just time-consuming to rectify, but can also incur fines to your company!
In a recent new book by Tracey Angwin called The Payroll Revolution (which has gone on to become an Australian best seller) Angwin discusses the responsibility of the payroll professional and offers practical and guided tips on Australian payroll.
Just some of the skills that Angwin suggests the payroll professional should possess are:
Strong people skills
AIS/payroll software experience (such as MYOB)
General email, word and excel skills
Strong understanding of superannuation and PAYG
Good knowledge of the Fairwork Act
Ability to work under pressure and to tight deadlines
With the new financial year, there’s a new minimum wage.
While you were busy with EOFY analysis — see our tips and checklists to ensure you haven’t missed anything important — you may have missed the Fair Work Commission announcing that the minimum living wage has increased by 2.6% from 1 July this year.
The New Minimum Wage
The new minimum wage for every Australian worker is $622.20 per week or $16.37 per hour and this affects all employees; even if they’re not covered by a modern award.
You’ll need to update your payroll records in MYOB to reflect this new change (we cover changes to payroll in our MYOB course if you’re not sure) so that you don’t get caught out paying your staff at the old pay rate.
If your staff are covered by a modern award and you’re not sure what their new rate of pay will be, you can check the Fair Work Award Finder on the Fair Work Commission’s website to ensure you’re paying your employees the correct rate of pay.
Effective from 1 July
As with the increase to the superannuation guarantee, the increases to the minimum wage is effective from 1 July. However, unlike the superannuation guarantee, an employee cannot receive two separate pay rates in one pay period.
This means that for businesses that pay their employees on a fortnightly or monthly basis, where part of their employees’ pay covers a week or few weeks in June and another part of their employees’ pay covers July, the employer needs to pay the old rate for that entire period and apply the new pay rate from the next full pay period commencing after 1 July.
It’s also important to keep in mind that most allowances (such as, leading-hand and industry allowances) are based on a percentage of the base rate and since this has increased, those allowances will increase, too.
If you’re unsure what these allowances will increase to, check the modern award on the Department of Fairwork’s Award Finder or register for email updates from Fairwork about how the changes apply to each particular award.
Everyone’s smiling: Your clients will benefit if you opt to go virtual.
In our last post we discussed why we updated our MYOB training material to include MYOB’s cloud accounting software Account Right Live and how you could benefit from operating a completely remote or virtual bookkeeping business, which is great; but how do your clients benefit from your working remotely?
Convincing the Clients
Winning new clients is always difficult, but it can be especially difficult to convince the old school business owner that hiring a virtual bookkeeper is the way to go: “But I like having someone come in and sit down with me” is not an uncommon counter remark; while for many the idea of a remote bookkeeper conjures notions of unqualified cowboys.
If you’re thinking about starting a virtual bookkeeping business or turning your existing business into a virtual one, then you need to get used to overcoming these obstacles if you’re going to have any success.
It’s worth stating upfront to any potential clients, or existing clients you’re trying to convert, the benefits of retaining a remote bookkeeper over your bookkeeper that makes house calls, or office calls, rather.
Just some benefits:
By retaining a virtual bookkeeper, your clients only pay for time worked; that means their hourly rate is not inflated with hidden travel costs, which usually includes the time they spend commuting to your office
Virtual bookkeepers don’t have the costly overheads of renting office space, paying for utilities, equipment, storage space, and so forth — all of which decreases their hourly rate
For those businesses that may usually employ a bookkeeper as a full-time or part-time member of staff, using a remote bookkeeper means they’re no longer paying sick leave, annual leave and other entitlements
All bookkeepers, whether they work remotely or otherwise, have to be accredited by the Tax Practitioners Board to offer BAS services.
***
If you’re thinking of starting a virtual bookkeeping business, our online MYOB course covers MYOB Account Right Live — a necessary piece of software to make any virtual bookkeeping business not only successful, but also feasible.
Virtual bookkeepers can dictate their hours and place of work.
WHEN MYOB FINALLY ENTERED the cloud accounting fray in 2012, we were pretty excited and we quickly updated our course material to reflect this new era of MYOB.
Moving MYOB online gave contract and home-based bookkeepers new career opportunities: the ability to go virtual.
A virtual or remote bookkeeping business is much the same as any other home-based or contract bookkeeping business; you still offer the same services — BAS and GST, for instance — except for one notable difference: you work entirely remotely from your home office.
Run Your Bookkeeping Business Anywhere, 24/7
Running your bookkeeping business from any location, any time of any day means you are never required to visit a client’s office to collect documents — or even work from their office. With MYOB in the cloud, all of your clients’ accounts are accessible from any computer, anywhere, any time you choose.
Rather than being confined to a client base in your immediate local area or city, working as a virtual bookkeeper opens you up to the possibility of working with people all over the country.
For bookkeepers operating in small communities where business opportunities may have previously been limited, becoming a remote or virtual bookkeeper will increase your business exponentially.
But virtual bookkeeping businesses have their benefits to city folk, as well. Because you don’t have to spend hours commuting to and from your clients’ offices, you can use that time to either pick up additional clients — or spend it with your family.
A remote or virtual bookkeeping business allows you the flexibility of working when you want, where you want, without having to compromise on your earning potential.
***
And it’s why we were so excited when MYOB created MYOB Account Right Live: now the graduates from our online MYOB courses can compete with the big-name bookkeeping firms from their own homes; wherever they might be.
We often talk about the benefits of studying an MYOB course online or how using cloud-based accounting software to telework benefits employees and employers, but we don’t often discuss the benefits of cloud computing to the environment.
A recent study commissioned by internet giant Google and carried out by Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory in the US, found that if the entire US workforce moved into cloud computing — where employees would now work from their home offices — it could save up to 87 percent of the energy used to power IT systems. That’s enough energy to power the entire city of Los Angeles for a year.
Using the Cloud Means Going Green
For Google, this showed just how great the energy saving potential of the internet is — something we’ve often discussed in posts about operating a home-based or virtual bookkeeping business.
In fact, the Green Factor is another reason why we moved all of our training materials and content online in 2007; it meant we would no longer have the costly overheads of powering physical training centres (and adding to our carbon footprint), allowing us to deliver the same high quality training courses at a lower price.
Of course, being an internet company, Google only looked at the IT energy savings to be had if every worker in the US began working from their home offices. They didn’t look at the potential knock-on effect this would have when two or more people in a household were both working from home.
The Communal Office
So while saving some 23 billion kilowatt-hours in energy is a massive feat, we wonder how much of that energy would be reinvested in individuals’ upsizing their homes or renting office spaces once working at home with the whole family became more distracting than it did productive? Perhaps, then, a chain of communal office spaces might become the next McDonalds of the digital world?
***
Regardless of whether it’s a saving of 23 billion kilowatt-hours of just 23 kilowatt-hours, increasing our energy efficiency and reducing our carbon footprint is always a good thing; cloud-based software and studying online goes along way to doing just that.
Print out our checklist of what you need to complete before the end of financial year.
If you have recently started your own business after completing our online MYOB training course, and this is your first time doing end of financial year (EOFY) analysis, never fear — here’s an EOFY checklist to make sure you’re ready!
Even if you’re a veteran bookkeeper, these are still handy tips that are often overlooked in the rush to get everything ready by 30 June.
Before the EOFY:
Make sure you present and clear any old cheques before 30 June before you reconcile your bank accounts — you don’t want to leave these until the following financial year, as it create problems later on down the line.
Also chase-up any outstanding debtors (people who haven’t paid an invoice that’s overdue) as, again, if it’s paid after 30 June, this can create problems later on.
If you have any outstanding debtors that are more than 12 months old, cut your losses (so to speak) and claim back the GST.
You should also write off any old stock if it is also more than 12 months old.
Once this is done, reconcile your accounts — is your un-deposited funds account bank to nil? If not, you need to go back and investigate why.
Make sure you have all of your employees’ tax file numbers before 30 June.
Pay your June Superannuation Guarantee Charge (SGC) by 30 June this year to ensure you actually get the tax deduction this year.
Also make sure you pay all your SGC obligations before 28 July 2013 to avoid SGC review and all the time-consuming paperwork that goes with it.
Don’t leave your payment summaries until the last minute — by law you have to provide these to your staff by 14 July, so you give yourself plenty of time.
Remember: In MYOB the software requires you to enter a tax file number for all employees regardless of whether they have one or whether you have to print a payment summary for them or not.
In this instance use the following codes:
For a New Payee that has not made a TFN Declaration, but 28 days have not passed use: 111 111 111
Payee is under 18 years of age and earnings do not exceed $350 per week, $700 per fortnight or $1,517 per month use: 333 333 333
Payee is an Australian Government pensioner payee use: 444 444 444
Payee chooses not to quote a TFN and has not claimed an exemption from quoting a TFN or does not fit into any of the above categories use: 000 000 000.
***
And while we’re dispensing handy tips, we find that if you have a checklist of all the things you must do for as part of your end of financial year analysis, you’re less likely to forget anything. So why not print out this list and keep it by your desk so you don’t get caught out.
Online study (or correspondence or distance learning, as it was once known) has long divided people into two camps: those who see online or distance students as being self-motivated and dedicated, and those traditionalists or purists who see face-to-face learning as being, in some way, superior.
Truthfully, both sides are probably right. Face-to-face learning does force interaction between students — a precursor to real-life interaction and networking in business.
Business Means Dealing with People
We have often said that one of the fundamental requirements when starting a business is being able to plan. Another, however, is being able to interact and communicate with people from many walks-of-life. And from time-to-time, this means respecting the ideas and opinions of your colleagues whether you agree or not.
Managing or running a business often has less to do with balance sheets and more to do with managing people, or rather, managing different personalities. To a large extent, these are skills you learn in the playground; the university campus.
But they’re also frequently skills a person either inherently has or hasn’t. University doesn’t teach these skills as much as it brings them out in people already possessing them.
Take Mark Zuckerberg — an ambitious Internet visionary — but someone ill-equipped to deal with people and personalities (it’s Sheryl Sandberg who does that), even though he studied face-to-face at university, where Facebook was born. It’s true that face-to-face learning can sometimes conceal a great deal of unmotivated people — people that require constant direction, attention and supervision.
Online Study: If YOU Like Being in Charge
Online study doesn’t allow you to be unmotivated and in constant need of direction; it’s wholly autonomous and requires students to have a great deal of self-motivation, drive and ambition. These are traits that, for a person completing a course in bookkeeping with the intention to work as a sole-trader, will go a long way in determining your success a business owner.
Online students also show a great deal of technological savvy — the ability to work with new systems without a person at the ready to prompt you or answer your questions is an invaluable trait for business owners that often only have themselves to rely on for guidance.
In many ways, online students are problem-solvers; where it’s human nature to put our hand up for help, online students are forced to really look at the problem-at-hand logically, and thoroughly exhaust their options before sending off an email or picking up the phone.
But like universities don’t teach social interaction — they merely foster it — online study doesn’t teach autonomy. I would say that online students are attracted to online study because they already possess those traits likely to make them successful in business.
***
When you enrol in one of our MYOB training courses, you should be happy to know that you’re among a group of self-motivated, ambitious individuals with the drive and determination to succeed.
Together with EzyLearn, you’re on track to become the next small-business entrepreneur.
IF YOU’RE FAMILIAR WITH our online MYOB courses you might recall that we offer a money-back guarantee. We’ve always offered this guarantee because online training is still a relatively new phenomenon for many students. Perhaps these students would still prefer some one-to-one, personal attention from a tutor in a class-based training course.
Our original money-back guarantee was for 7 days, but after speaking with a handful of new students they seemed anxious that they didn’t have enough time to get around the course to see if it’s right for them. Some of our fastest students manage to get through the entire course within 5 days, most people get through it in 2-3 weeks, but regardless of how fast or slow you learn, all new students have the 30 day money-back guarantee.
We also offer the 30-day money back guarantee because we think we offer the most comprehensive MYOB courses available in Australia. Our online MYOB training includes:
5 MYOB courses (Set Up to Payroll)
7 training workbooks (some MYOB courses have 2 workbooks)
7 different case studies (each workbook takes you through another example of how MYOB accounting software is used)
Over 250 training videos
Several MYOB versions (version 15 to 19, as well as the latest version 2012)
Knowledge Reviews to test your skills regularly throughout the course
12 month’s or Lifetime Access so you can use the MYOB courses as an ongoing resource.
FREE student membership to the Institute of Certified Bookkeepers (ICB)
Our MYOB courses will give you confidence whether you:
are applying for a job that requires MYOB
want to be more useful in your current job OR
want to start (or better manage) your own small business
Our new 30-day money-back guarantee shows how confident we are in the value of our online training courses. Find out more about our MYOB training courses. Enrol today and start by 5pm next business day.
Existing students for our MYOB training courses will be thrilled to know that they can now have access to our latest new course for MYOB Setup using AccountRight version 2012!
We create new content regularly and because of the huge amount of change that MYOB software is currently going through we are updating most of our material and creating a lot of new training content. This recent batch of training material has been created by our registered BAS agent, Jacci.
If you are familiar with our LIFETIME student access offer you’ll be thrilled to know that existing students can access this new MYOB training course for free! This is a fantastic time for us to demonstrate the benefits of our LIFETIME student access because we manage to give our existing customers something new that they don’t need to pay any extra money for.
[quote]This is our chance to deliver the benefits to students who have been using our courses for years.[/quote]
What’s even better is our most popular MYOB training course for Day-to-Day transactions is 75% through it’s remake for version 2012 so expect an announcement via this blog site shortly.
We’ll also reveal some of the videos to demonstrate the differences between the earlier version and the current version of MYOB software via this blog.
If you are not a subscriber, then subscribe to receive these blog posts in your email.
If you are considering enrolling into an MYOB training course you don’t need to be in Sydney, Melbourne, Perth or Brisbane. You can be anywhere in Australia or even across the world, as some of our students are, and get the benefits of our online MYOB training. Find out more about our MYOB Training Courses.
We use this blog post to introduce new content for our online MYOB training courses as well as our Excel, Word and WordPress courses. This new content has been created after a MYOB Course Q&A Support request from Andrea in New Zealand.
We wrote a blog post in September 2011 about data file formats that are used in our MYOB Bank Reconciliation Training Course. In that blog post we wrote about exporting the accounts list that MYOB uses as the foundation for the company file and that all transactions are then based on. This accounts list is known in the accounting world as your Chart of Accounts.
Today we announce some new training videos for our MYOB Reporting and GST Course (code 504). It covers the exporting of Payroll information from MYOB of employee card files and Payroll information using both the Report Centre in MYOB AccountRight version 12 as well as the Import/Export wizard.
As an EzyLearn student you receive LIFETIME access to the MYOB Training Courses so feel free to login to the training site and go to the GST and Reporting Course to view videos 504301 and 504302. If you are not a student learn about what’s included in our training courses and see why hundreds of students enrol with us every year.
Type the first 3 characters to discover courses, up-skilling programs and CPD articles.
EzyLearn's Career Academy
Enrolled into an EzyLearn course since 2013? Get access to new & updated course content and support by joining the EzyLearn Course Refresher Access membership Program. See how to extend your course life & support.
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…
