I RECENTLY SPOKE WITH the owner of a hairdressing salon who’s been in business for over 18 years (at various different businesses). This woman has ALWAYS used a manual wages timesheet system.
Our team are exploring typical rosters and problems which occur in the payroll processing, and as such, we’re also exploring all the different ways that wages are managed.
Continue reading How Are You Managing Rostering, Timesheet, Wages, PAYG, Super?
WE HAVE TALKED about lifelong learning in a previous post; lifelong learning being the concept of learning as an ongoing exercise that individuals should undertake throughout their lifetimes, in order to remain productive and engaged members of society. In other words, learning never stops.
Lifelong learning is particularly important in the workplace, where the rates of technological advancement threaten to wipe out entire professions and replace them with new ones. We’ve talked about Xero’s newly announced lifelong learning platform, which launched in November 2017, in partnership with Swinburne University (for Australia and New Zealand). A full global roll out is expected in 2018.
We are also thrilled to announce our new Lifelong Learning Hub for all EzyLearn students to access. It is part of our Additions and Updates policy and all students who have signed up for Lifetime Access since 2013, and all students within their 12-month access period, can access the following:
Xero’s Lifelong Learning Platform is clever, but it’s a misnomer since “lifelong learning”, as a concept, doesn’t relate to a single pursuit (accounting or finance), but rather an individual’s entire attitude toward learning and how they learn.
If you haven’t already, I recommend you go back and read our post about lifelong learning, specifically the section on the four pillars of learning, which outlines four key types of learning – another topic we’ve covered at length in the past.
Xero’s lifelong learning platform offers just one pillar (learning to do) of lifelong learning, not a framework to engaging in lifelong learning, the concept.
Have you ever gone to re-watch a movie or TV show on Netflix and discovered that it’s been removed from the Netflix library to make way for other titles? Good thing, you’ve seen it already.
The same happens at educational institutions that have to update or make way for a new course, and so they purge their content and course offerings. (Just try and find a TAFE that teaches shorthand nowadays, even though it remains a sought-after skill in a lot of professions.)
If you’ve already taken a now-deleted course, the good news is that you’ve learned those skills already. The bad news is that you can’t go back and brush up on them. The ever worse news is that you have to start a new course from scratch if you want to build on your existing skills with the update content.
That’s where EzyLearn’s Lifetime Access training courses are different. When you enrol in a training course with lifetime access, you have access to every version of that training course for life. When we update our course content, we continue to provide you with access to previous content (which includes older versions of the software), so you can go back and refresh your skills.
As Continuing Professional Development (CPD) is a requirement for most professions today, but particularly for bookkeepers and BAS agents, the Bookkeeping Academy’s training courses with lifetime access are also recognised by the ICB, so you get your CPD points and access to all of our course content for as long as you need it — for one, low price.
If you join the EzyLearn Beta Club, you get access to our courses that are still in development, giving you the opportunity to learn new skills before other students, and provide feedback on the types of exercises and scenarios you’d like to see in our courses.
Our Beta Club courses are important to us because we get to hone our course content based on feedback from students while the courses are still in development. This saves us lots of time, particularly if the feedback from students means we take the course in a substantially different direction.
It also benefits our students and partners who get the content before it’s officially launched, and can request content that covers areas of business relevant to them and their clients. This helps students and partners stay ahead of industry trends, and become experts before the courses are officially rolled out.
EzyLearn already has a number of training courses currently in beta and available to our Beta Club members. Visit our website for more information on Lifetime Access training courses and our Beta Club.
YOU COULD CALL IT a New Years Resolution that we’ve managed to tick off already! Early January 2018 I promised that EzyLearn would make the MYOB Essentials Courses available with our traditional MYOB AccountRight Courses and that offer is NOW available as a COMBO OFFER — see our Bookkeeping Academy page for the details.
We have 4 MYOB Essentials Courses available (MYOB Essentials Accounting, Daily Transactions, GST/BAS & Reporting AND MYOB Essentials Payroll Course) and it’s a popular course for those wanting a good payroll solution without spending the earth.
Continue reading MYOB Essentials Accounting, Credit Management & Payroll Courses COMBINED
WE’RE OFTEN ASKED whether Xero, MYOB and QuickBooks software is provided free with our training courses.
Unfortunately, we’re not given free access to accounting software, so we can’t pass free software access onto our students either. However, we do let you know where you can access trial or student versions while you complete our courses.
It made me wonder: Who’s driving the demand for these programs? It turns out, it’s usually someone’s bookkeeper or accountant recommending them. And this is usually because they’ve done a training course and learnt how to use one or more of the major accounting packages.
Some bookkeepers take a 15 percent cut of the monthly subscription fee because they’re a certified MYOB / Xero / QuickBooks consultant — and that’s why they recommend a particular package. I personally think that bookkeepers or BAS agents who do this should disclose that they are earning an ongoing commission — just as real estate agents need to make these declarations in their agency agreements.
It also happens that a lot of business owners don’t know about alternative accounting packages. Therefore they simply choose the brand name they’ve heard about the most. I discovered this with real estate agents when it comes to who they choose for their social media marketing services — most of them ask what software or which person Joe Blow uses and then assume it’s good enough for them.
Selecting an accounting package to use is often one of the first things a new business owner does. At this stage, however, they may not even be aware of what they require from an accounting package; never mind what sorts of alternatives they should be looking at. When first starting out, they’re just anxious to be able to invoice and get paid by their first client.
Zoho, Freshbooks and Wave are three other accounting packages that are either free or very inexpensive.
These three also include many of the same features you’ll find in the three big name accounting packages — MYOB, Xero and QuickBooks.
Zoho: Free invoicing software allows one user, invoice up to five customers; paid subscriptions from $7 U.S. per month; add extra features (expenses, subscription management, inventory management) as required. Pricing for Zoho Books, the complete accounting package, start at $9 U.S. per month for 2 users, 50 contacts, 5 automated workflows.
Freshbooks: Complete accounting software includes unlimited invoices, accept online and credit card payments, multiple devices, reports, payment reminders, notifications when clients have received, viewed, paid invoices; pricing starts at $15 U.S. per month for 5 active contacts (customers).
Wave: Forever free invoicing and accounting software includes unlimited estimates and invoices, generate reports, scan receipts, bank feeds (accounting package), and more; accept credit card and online payments for a fee (1.75 percent for ever 30 cents AUD); payroll $36 AUD per month.
We recommend either Wave or Zoho for small but growing businesses, looking for a cheap or free accounting solution. Wave, in particular, provides a fairly robust accounting package that’s entirely free, and remains so if you don’t intend to take credit card or online payments (lots of businesses do, but many more don’t). In fact, they even have their own smartphone apps to capture receipts and create invoices while you’re at a clients!
If you anticipate you might want to add other productivity apps, like a CRM, inventory management, IT helpdesk, recruitment tools, or collaborate in a team project, Zoho is a good place to start, as these features can be turned on and off as required.
Of course, these accounting packages are rarely used or recommended by accountants or bookkeepers, who prefer to work with Xero, MYOB or QuickBooks because they provide the functionality needed to complete and lodge activity statements. If you’ll be working with a bookkeeper or accountant, it’s best to stick with one of the brand name three.
If you need training in MYOB, Xero and QuickBooks, our online training courses will show you how to set up and use various aspects of the software. More importantly, they will take you through detailed case studies where you can enter all the transactions performed by various different business types eg. professional services, trades and even the sale of inventory products. Visit our website for more information or to enrol.
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Every EzyLearn student now has a student account FOR LIFE!OK, before I continue let me just clarify: If you’ve only signed up for 12 months’ course access to, say, the Xero Beginners’ Certificate Courses, then you get access to those courses for 12 months. If you sign up for LIFETIME Course Access to the Xero COMPLETE Training Course package you get Lifetime Course Access to all the Xero courses PLUS Updates and Additions.
[box type=”info”] So, what does a student account for LIFE really mean?[/box]
When you enrol into an online training course with EzyLearn, we create a student account with a username and password so you can then log in and proceed to your training courses. A couple years ago we introduced FREE Student Inclusions as a way of giving EzyLearn students more reason to expand their knowledge and learn new things. Today’s announcement is to let you know that you get access to these free courses for LIFE!
Free student inclusions is one reason to enrol with EzyLearn but the new LIFELONG Learning Hub will give you so much more and here’s an example.
We currently have a special offer for any new student enrolling into any of our courses where you get access to the
All of this is accessible from the LIFELONG Learning Hub right now — to everyone who has enrolled into an EzyLearn course since January 2013 — EVERYONE!
IF YOU ARE LIKE most businesses, you’re probably communicating with your customers and clients via multiple touch points — email, social media, phone calls, chat bots. But how are you keeping track of all these interactions?
A while back I wrote a blog asking the question whether MYOB is, in fact, a CRM and which CRMs I found to be the best and why. It’s worth a read if you want to familiarise yourself with exactly what it is CRMs can do for you and your business.
Continue reading The Best Xero-Integrated CRMs
WE REGULARLY PARTAKE in competitive analysis so we can keep giving you top quality online training courses for the best value out there, and in doing so, I found an online offer for not just one, but THREE levels of MYOB — Intro, Intermediate and Payroll OR ALL THREE for $99.
Not mentioning any names; we’re not in the business of naming and shaming and, besides, you can search the deal easily enough online yourself, but it prompted me to put out a reminder that not all courses are created equal.
I guess it’s obvious to some degree, but many of us are still misled by marketing, and sometimes what’s packaged to the customer as an online training course, is simply a pile of videos (and not even featuring current and up-to-date software versions, either!) all plonked together. You know what, you can get this, and possibly more, directly off You Tube for free!
There are many online courses available for cheap prices, but many of these same courses are not providing training on the latest version of software packages. A quick scan of the fine print shows that this particular $99 MYOB deal is training you on Version 19 of MYOB. This dates back to 2010, which in any one’s language, is very old. Very, very old.
As part of our suite of online MYOB courses, we include access to our old “archived” courses where we use version 19 of MYOB; only for the benefit of those people who still use it and don’t need features like payroll, super and other added features that you’d expect to get after 8 or so years of software development.
Another thing to be wary of is “retail price” comparisons. Plenty of these may be legit, but there are others out there who deliberately distort the truth or make a current cheap offer seem far more appealing by comparing their cheap price to a retail price that isn’t really indicative of what’s on offer out there online.
Make sure you’re talking “courses for courses” and that the retail price comparison isn’t looking at prices from half a decade ago or thereabouts. The price of online training courses is a forever shifting thing, so do your research!
In our books, an online training course that’s actually going to deliver results for you should come with these ingredients at the very least:
The training course should feature the training on the software as it is in its current version and this training, or training videos, workbooks, whatever, should be provided in an order that’s been carefully considered, trialled and tested.
Oh, and some testimonials by real people vouching for the effectiveness, quality and professionalism of the course content and course content provider is pretty important too. Then there’s CPD point accreditation, access to lifelong learning platforms, the option to get lifetime course membership to course content so you’ll always get updates at no extra cost and have an “after course resource” … yep, don’t get me started, courses simply ain’t all the same and you usually pay for what you get (though I think we’re super cost-effective by those standards!)
People say “if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is”. This isn’t always the case, and sometimes excellent opportunities in life seem, at first, too good to be true. But when it comes to online MYOB courses for $99 or $29 or $69 or whatever the probably-too-good-to-be-true price point is, just make sure you’re getting apples for apples, or courses for courses, or horses for horses, Mr Ed.
You can watch some FREE MYOB course videos? Scroll through our freebies list of online training videos that you can watch without charge or obligation and subscribe to our blog to get updates to more free videos as we’re adding them all the time. Or check out our special offers page to see what discounts we’re giving at the moment or online training courses in MYOB, Xero, Excel and many others.
XERO HAS A NEW bookkeeper and accountant platform, Xero HQ, which is available to Xero Partners, and includes a whole new app marketplace geared towards bookkeepers and accountants with a minimum of 100 clients.
One of the most recommended apps in the HQ partner app marketplace, was BOMA, a marketing and advertising platform that lets you create and broadcast marketing and advertising messages across five channels (email, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter).
There are lots of marketing automation platforms on the market (MailChimp, Aweber, Constant Contact, Get Response, to name a few), so BOMA is competing in a crowded space. The first difference you’ll notice between BOMA and the market leader, MailChimp, is the price.
BOMA charges a minimum of $49 U.S. ($67.74 UD) a month to create unlimited social media marketing campaigns and send unlimited emails to 500 contacts; by contrast, MailChimp charges $10 U.S. ($13.43 AUD).
But MailChimp doesn’t integrate with Xero, so you need to import your contacts some other way (an Excel spreadsheet and by capturing data using an “opt-in” button). You also can’t create marketing or advertising campaigns for LinkedIn or Twitter in MailChimp, though it does support creating re-targeting advertisements for Google.
The most time-consuming aspect of any marketing or advertising campaign is the design stage. MailChimp provides templates, but unless you want to use the pre-designed templates, you need to bring your own images. Or pay to access an image library like Getty Images. Included in BOMA’s monthly fee is free access to a library of 250,000 images.
Once you’ve created your design, BOMA will automatically re-format it to fit any marketing channel, be it email, Facebook newsfeed posts, Instagram sponsored posts, and so on.
BOMA uses machine learning, a sub branch of artificial intelligence, to power its contact segment feature. Machine learning is just as it sounds: machines learning to do things. It’s what powers the Netflix algorithm that recommends films and TV shows to you based on what you’ve viewed previously.
Without machine learning, Netflix wouldn’t be able to make individual recommendations (six or seven action movies with a strong female lead), but rather present a large pool of raw data (it’s entire library of action movies) for you to choose from.
And just as with Netflix, the more you use BOMA to send marketing and advertising campaigns, the better its insights will become.
Each time you send an email campaign, for instance, BOMA collects and analyses data about each individual contact so that it can make recommendations based on its analysis of that data: the best time to email certain contacts or the types of messages they respond to, and so on.
This is different to MailChimp and other platforms, which collect that data, but leave the analysis to you.
The Xero and BOMA partnership means that, aside from syncing client data in Xero with BOMA, you’re also given access to an exclusive library of content, covering a range of topics — “why use business software”, “get paid faster”, “create the perfect business plan” — that you can push out to your social channels.
In the future, if this integration was powered by machine learning, BOMA could create and send campaigns of pre-written content to an approved contact list at the times an algorithm has determined will be most effective, without any input from the user.
In the future, if this integration was powered by machine learning, BOMA could create and send campaigns of pre-written content to an approved contact list at the times an algorithm has determined will be most effective, without any input from the user.
That’s a ways off yet, though. That’s because BOMA is a startup, and it’s still in the process of developing and turning on features that are standard on many other platforms. (It only recently made it possible to upload contacts from a CSV file, for example.) Getting to partner with one of the world’s largest cloud accounting applications is a major win, especially when Xero has given it top billing in its HQ partner app marketplace.
So if you search the BOMA website for any mentions of MYOB or QuickBooks, you won’t find one; not even so much as a passing mention to say it doesn’t integrate or support MYOB or QuickBooks.
Who knows what the future might bring, but this is a platform play for Xero. And Xero has said plenty of times in the past that it would rather partner with third party providers, than develop their own services from scratch. If one starts to make real inroads, and it seems like a good long-term match for Xero, perhaps Xero will acquire it, but most likely it won’t.
And in the immediate short-term, BOMA ticks a couple of boxes for Xero: It provides a service that nearly every mid-size business needs, and it encourages bookkeepers and accountants to stay within the Xero ecosystem.
Xero is enticing to startups and app developers, because they offer a partnership, but don’t control how startups and their businesses operate. Currently, MYOB and QuickBooks don’t offer any such partnership, and that’s giving Xero the upper hand.
We are always exploring and analysing new and emerging technologies and introducing new content as part of our Updates and Additions policy. Any new content we add to the course in which you’re enrolled is yours’ for free if you’re a current EzyLearn student. Find out more about our suite of Xero online training courses.
XERO HAS LONG POSTIONED ITSELF as the cloud accounting software for small-to-medium businesses. It’s one of the most popular of our online training courses; appealing not only to bookkeepers, but small to medium sized businesses in all industries.
What makes Xero so popular is that it is inexpensive software that’s simple to use and has lots of time-saving features.
In doing so, it’s basically left MYOB to hold the mantle of the accounting software used by accountants and bookkeepers.
Now, however, Xero is looking to close that gap, with the launch of “Xero HQ”; a data and insights platform for bookkeepers and accountants who are part of the Xero Partner Program.
To shake MYOB’s stranglehold on the accountant and bookkeeper market, Xero had to do something to differentiate itself and tempt accountants and bookkeepers away from MYOB.
And they’re betting that Xero HQ will be the thing that does it. Xero HQ will provide bookkeepers and accountants with data and insights tools so they can provide “advisory level” services to clients.
Xero’s focus on “advisory level” services is important here, because it reveals a couple of things Xero plans to do with the industry. The first is to continue to automate many of the tasks a bookkeeper would traditionally carry out — the introduction of bank feeds eliminated data entry, for instance — and the second is to up-skill junior bookkeepers, while simultaneously embedding them within the Xero ecosystem — which will fit nicely with their recently launched Xero Lifelong Learning platform.
If you’re part of the Xero Partner Program already, then access to the Xero HQ platform is free. The Xero HQ platform is essentially a separate workflow that you access online, which provides a number of features not available though your regular Xero software.
These Xero HQ features include the following:
The Xero HQ platform also has an app marketplace, which has a focus on apps that will help bookkeepers and accountants with their business. That’s different to the existing Xero app marketplace, which is geared towards small businesses in any industry.
The Xero HQ app marketplace is split up into three tiers, depending on the size of your bookkeeping or accounting practice.
If you’ve 100 or fewer clients, then you’d be best suited to the “activate” package of apps especially “curated” by the Xero HQ team.
If you have between 100 and 200 clients, then you’re best suited to the “energise” package of apps; practices with 300 or more clients suit the “supercharge” package.
It’s up to you which apps you switch on, but Xero has eliminated the leg work involved in finding apps to suit your business needs.
Some common third party apps, recommended across all three Xero HQ app marketplace tiers include:
In essence, the Xero HQ platform is where accounting and customer relationship management meet. Xero provides bookkeepers and accountants with a platform that enables high-level analysis and data management through integrating third-party Xero HQ partner apps.
As I mentioned earlier in this post, Xero HQ serves dual purposes: it encourages bookkeepers to move away from providing basic bookkeeping services to deeper analysis and advisory roles; and they can use the Xero Lifelong Learning platform to up-skill and provide those services.
“Xero HQ serves dual purposes: it encourages bookkeepers to move away from providing basic bookkeeping services to deeper analysis and advisory roles…”
Our Xero online training courses include EVERYTHING for ONE LOW PRICE. Furthermore, if you select our Lifetime Membership option, you’ll have LIFETIME access to our ongoing course updates. All EzyLearn courses are accredited by the Institute of Certified Bookkeepers (ICB) and can be counted towards Continuing Professional Development (CPD) points. Find out more about our Xero online training courses.
IN THE PAST I wrote a blog titled Three Mistakes That Will Cost Your Business Thousands in Lost Revenue. Here I explored the importance of timeliness when it comes to quoting for work. However, there’s a difference between timeliness and a quick quote.
A painter I know was asked to give a quick price on how much it would cost to paint a room the same size as one he was currently working on. He said it would cost around $300, and that was that. The problem?
As I’ve mentioned in three Mistakes That Will Cost Your Business Thousands in Lost Revenue, you must always get a prospect’s name and contact details, so you can follow up on their interest in working with you.
Don’t assume that they’ll contact you if they want the work done. Sometimes they might, but most of the time the person will wait for YOU to close the sale. If you don’t, they’ll simply assume you’re not interested or too busy, and they’ll go find someone who is more interested.
Then ask for information on the following:
Even if our case study example; in this instance, the painter, was going to give a quick quote; he should be sure to make clear that it’s a rough quote that may change depending on those things.
Usually, the answer to this question is no. But the painter should make this clear. Often the cost of paint is the most expensive part of the job, and that $300 paint job might just be closer to double, depending on the type of paint used. Remember, people all too often confuse pricing a little on the low side, with winning work (and then making it work for you). In reality, this is usually mistake.
Our EzyStartup Course will you teach you about pricing your services, business planning, marketing, and running your small business efficiently. Visit our website for more information or to enrol — OR stay tuned by subscribing to our blog. Remember too: right now, for every student that enrols, you become part of our Lifelong Learning Hub where you can access our Selling Academy Sales Success Training Course absolutely FREE.
Lifelong learning is the concept that learning isn’t confined to an individual’s childhood, but can be pursued throughout their life, and often in non-traditional settings. With lifelong learning, the knowledge or skills a person acquires through social interactions and other everyday experiences (soft skills) are considered just as important as those learned in formal education settings.
This approach means that learning is no longer considered to take place at two, traditional stages of a person’s life — school and the workplace — but rather is ongoing throughout the individual’s life.
The concept of lifelong learning isn’t new. It’s been around since the 1970s, when it was referred to as “lifelong education” by the French politician Edgar Faure in his 197s book “Learning to Be”. Lifelong learning gained more recognition during the 1990s, particularly with the publication of the Delors Report by the Delors Commission in 1996.
The Delors Commission was an administration of the European Union led by Jacques Delors through the 1980s and again through the 1990s. The Delors Report proposed an integrated vision of education based on two key concepts:
The Delors Report identified three characteristics of modern life that made lifelong learning necessary, in order for individuals to remain productive and actively engaged members of society throughout their lives. Those characteristics included technological, economic and social change.
From the mid 1990s onward, rapid technological advancements have made lifelong learning especially critical for people in the workplace. Aside from the need to keep up-to-date with changes to software (desktop software shifting to the cloud) and the introduction of new technologies (smartphones and tablets), technology has also changed the way people work.
The majority of adolescents who start university today, will be studying for a degree in the profession that will not exist in twenty years time. But in twenty years, jobs will exist that did not today, just as social media and search engine optimisation did not exist twenty year ago. And this drives the need for people to engage in lifelong learning.
Technology has also fundamentally changed our economy. More people engage in freelance or contract work than they did twenty years ago, and that’s given rise to what’s now called the “gig economy” — people engaging in short term, piecemeal or temporary work as their primary means of income.
And that’s all coincided with some big changes to our society. Paid parental leave, for example, sees dads taking time off work to become the primary carer of their children, while a new crop of mums have chosen to start home-based businesses so they can work flexible hours while they care for their children.
In each instance of change, be it technological, social and economic — though technology is the driving force of all three — people have had to learn new skills for their workplace, either formerly or informally.
The Delors Report, which brought the concept of lifelong learning to greater prominence in the 90s, identified the four pillars of learning, which make up a central component of lifelong learning. The four pillars of learning involve:
Since the 1990s and the release of the Delors Report, universities and other formal education institutions have implemented some elements of lifelong learning, particularly the “learning to know” and “learning to live together” pillars of learning. In high school, students will study society and culture as a component of their HSC. This is designed to equip them with the tools to develop values and attitudes that promote social literacy and cohesion.
Workplaces have also become responsible to promoting lifelong learning by requiring employees to carry out continuing professional development (CPD) — although this is sometimes an industry requirement, as in the financial services and real estate sectors, for example.
Bookkeepers and BAS agents are required to maintain a certain number of CPD points each year in order to keep their BAS registration. The Institute of Certified Bookkeepers (ICB) is just one of many Recognised Professional Associations and it lists accepted training courses, including Microsoft Excel and cloud-accounting software training which are all available as LIFETIME Courses with EzyLearn! I like to think that EzyLearn can go one better than Delor and offer students the option to get LIFETIME course access to Xero rather than LIFELONG paying for Xero Courses.
This November, Xero also launched it’s own lifelong learning platform, in conjunction with Swinburne University. The Xero lifelong learning platform is currently being piloted in Australia and New Zealand, with a full global rollout expected in 2018.
The Xero offering will be available for secondary and tertiary students, as well as businesses. It will provide students with access to a learning management system (LMS) that will deliver training in the form of business scenarios and simulations, in addition to grading and assessment tools.
Xero’s chief partner officer Anna Curzon said in a statement that technology has “reshaped the way people work” and created a need for lifelong learning so people can “stay relevant in the workforce”.
“Handling finances, both personal and business, is a necessity for everyone, from school age students to retirees,” she said.
“Xero lifelong learning platform allows students to grow their financial literacy to help prepare them for the real world.”
Curzon also said that the gig economy is driving demand for Xero’s services, which in itself is driving demand for a lifelong learning platform centered around financial literacy.
No pricing for Xero’s lifelong learning platform has been released, though it’s understood it will be included in the subscription price of the Xero software for businesses.
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IT’S THAT TIME OF YEAR again when my team and I review the success of our marketing for 2017 and plan our strategies for the New Year. The topic of interest-free student loans was on the agenda, so I thought I’ll write something about it.
Personally, debt has always been something that has terrified me until about 5 years ago. This stemmed from a time in my mid twenties when I got a commercial hire purchase (CHP) loan to buy an extra Telstra Mitsubishi van. It was selling for $12,000 at the time (which was a lot of money for me) and I paid it off within a year but needed to pay a penalty because the loan was for a fixed period — it cost me $16,000!
This experience left me feeling completely ripped off and began my intrigue into the different type of loans available to businesses, the risks, and how lenders cover their risks as much as possible. Then Jerry Harvey started spruiking the “buy now with nothing to pay for 3 years” mantra that has become commonplace for many retail businesses. We now have every man and his dog business giving away interest-free credit which usually comes with a credit card attached.
The fact is that borrowing money costs someone and if you’re offered an interest free loan it just means that the loan cost is being absorbed by the seller.
If you’ve completed our MYOB or Xero courses (or you’re already working in accounts) you’d know that a course debt is a liability to the student but an asset to the lender and that asset can be sold or written off. Further, if you read the financial news you’ll see that major retailers are either selling their debt or their in-store cards or credit card to the highest bidder.
The problem I have with any form of debt, except buying an income producing asset like real estate or business assets (or a business), is that if you can’t afford it now how will you be able to pay it back later?
Cashflow for a business is often lumpy and the interest cost for cashflow lending is an expense which comes off your taxable income. In this sense it’s “good debt”, but personal debt that can’t be claimed as an expense is bad and often you’re better off finding the same product or course for a cheaper price and just paying that — or use your existing credit card (and pay it back in time). Read about our newest Xero Cashflow, Budgets and ROI Course.
So, back to our marketing dilemma. EzyLearn has only ever tested part payments of courses and realised that we’re not a lender and rather than pay the cost of having a loan facility we’d prefer to include as much as possible in our courses (including additions and updates) and offer our courses at a cheap and competitive price with occasional special offers.
At EzyLearn we offer online training courses to help you up-skill and find employment. Choose from our range of cloud-based online accounting software courses, to business start up and management courses, to marketing and sales courses, or update and further your skills in a range of Microsoft Office programs (Excel, PowerPoint, Word) or social media and WordPress web design).
DID YOU KNOW research shows that by taking just one short course on small business management, the chance a business will fail is reduced by as much as 50 percent.
This is because business mismanagement is the primary reason businesses fail; the other most common reason is because owner/s fail to implement appropriate credit management processes. In both cases, this failure has come about because the owners, directors, partners or managers lacked the appropriate management skills to make it a success.
The Christmas holidays is a perfect time for taking the steps needed to start your small business. While everyone else has gone on holidays, you’ll be ready to take on your first client or customer by the time business really starts kicking off again at the end of January.
So let’s get to it: there’s work to be done. And this work generally requires some rudimentary knowledge of Australian tax law, copyright law, trademarks and patents.
You should also have knowledge of particular software applications, and digital marketing.
The key areas business owners should understand before starting a business include:
Ordinarily, to become skilled in each of those areas, a person would have to take, at least, five different training courses. But few people are ever likely to do this. Instead, they’d be more likely to cherry pick the areas they’re least familiar with, and fly blind with the others. Needless to say, that’s where people run into problems.
We don’t want you to wing it or fly blind — our goal is to help small businesses succeed which is what we’ve been doing for nearly 20 years.
We cover what you need to set up a small business in our EzyStartUp Business Course, priced at just $297. This course covers each of the key areas mentioned above that a small business owner needs to be familiar with, in addition to the following:
Use your time off from work this summer to begin working on your new small business. All of our training courses are delivered online, and can be completed at your own pace, so you can complete them while you’re actually on holidays, or relaxing at home or at a cafe.
And since one of the best ways to start a new business is by operating it as a side project to your other job, if you get all the start up stuff out of the way while you’re on holidays, it’ll be ready to go by the time you back to work.
And as a gift to you, remember our Bookkeeping Basics Guide is yours’ for free!
I’M NO STRANGER TO NETWORKING, no stranger to making speeches, doing presentations and so forth. But creating a video is still NERVE WRACKING!
We all have issues about how we look, how we sound, how well we present ourselves and I went through all of these emotions before creating this video — SO I hope you like it.
It’s only short and covers all the topics I was hoping to convey and I’d love to hear your feedback. It’s so easy to create videos and publish them on your own website these days and we show you how to do this in our WordPress courses.
EzyLearn is a small business and we’ve been teaching students how to use software to:
And,we’ve been doing it for over 20 years.
When we created the training courses for MYOB in the late 1990’s I decided that we, as a company, need to create our own training materials so that we could define the learning stories that take students from epiphany to epiphany — that is one of the most rewarding aspects of training.
I was fortunate enough to work with some very experienced MYOB Certified Consultants who helped deliver and influence the contents of our MYOB bookkeeping course training materials. Since those days we have added and added, and refined content, based on feedback from student feedback.
We’ve also worked with registered BAS agents, accountants and corporate accounting staff to continue to add to and refine our courses so we can keep providing the BEST VALUE FOR MONEY COURSES in Xero & MYOB.
Having a good track record, great training courses and satisfied students is a great reward for running EzyLearn, but the best part — and the part that I could not do without — is the team of people I’m fortunate enough to work with, and part of this message is to thank YOU for helping me grow and manage the EzyLearn experience. Those people are:
Plus there are the various smaller tasks which our international workers and virtual assistants have helped with as well, so thanks too to you all!
As a training course content creator EzyLearn focuses on our niche markets of
and in 2018 we’re going to give existing students more (watch out for an announcement about our LIFELONG Learning Platform — which will include MYOB and QuickBooks courses, not just Xero).
We’ve also beefed up the success programs for employees working through their careers and the sales success program to help our students upskill and reskill to earn more in 2018.
Learn more about these programs here:
Make you subscribe using the form below or at this EzyLearn Blog Subscribe Link to receive these updates.
I’ve spent a lot of time learning more about property investment, renovation and the real estate industry and we’ll have some new courses in 2018 to help you improve your retirement and wealth by investing in property. Stay tuned for that!
In a previous post, Is Your Charge-Out Rate a Marketing or Business Strategy?, I talked about Mark the painter, who charged a really low day rate that ultimately proved to be unsuccessful, because he couldn’t carry out the volume of jobs he needed to for it to be profitable.
When I asked Mark why he chose such a low day rate, he said it was because no other painter could possibly compete with him. Sure that’s probably true, but obviously, for good reason!
What Mark really should have done was to research the market to determine precisely what other painters are charging, and for which services.
Determine the industry averageA good starting point is to determine the average price for your industry. Be diligent and look at as many businesses in your local and surrounding areas to ensure you’re getting a clear picture of what people are charging.
It’s really hard to justify charging much below the industry average, even if you’re trying to get new business.
As I mentioned in the last post about day rates, low prices is a numbers game. Unless you’re able to turn work around exceptionally quickly to justify taking a cut on your profit margin, then it’s probably not worth it.
In our work with National Bookkeeping we discovered that bookkeeper charge out rates fall into some distinct categories based on their knowledge, experience and how they prefer to work. These rates are a great guide to help you become comfortable with your own hourly rate.
Rather than reducing your rates to get new business, try to give customers savings elsewhere. You can do this by providing something your competitors aren’t, which is why researching the market thoroughly is a crucial part of your business strategy.
If you determine that your competitors charge a call out fee or a fee to prepare walls, this is a good place to start reducing or eliminating those charges in order to make yourself more competitive.
If potential customers are finding you via your website, it’s important to have a good call to action that contains reasons for people to make contact with you. Then make sure you highlight the reasons to call.
Believe it or not, one of the most challenging aspects of your market research and the OFFER you make to potential customers is that your competitors will also be researching what you are doing and if they feel it is a good offer they may copy it — so you may want to have a couple different offers and discounts and change them regularly to stay unique.
Use WordPress, a Blog and Social Media posts to keep your business looking fresh online and as well as attract the attention of potential customers — we cover all of this in our Digital & Social Media Marketing Courses.
You can learn how to research the market by enrolling in the Market Research Module of our Business StartUp Training Course as a stand alone mini course. Visit our website for more information or to enrol.
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Every business needs a web presence, and it’s become a lot cheaper and easier to get one. Where it once could cost many thousands of dollars to have a web designer get your business online, you can now build your own website yourself, quite cheaply.
That’s due to the number of cheap open-source content management systems that have come the market, like WordPress (by far, the market leader), then there is Wix, Squarespace, and even Google Sites (part of Google’s G Suite productivity apps for business). Our online WordPress Training Courses include the basic creating and editing of website pages and blogs posts to more advanced features only available to WordPress Site Admins.
You might find it interesting that MYOB offers a website service and it makes me wonder whether MYOB has the single focus on building the best accounting software for small business or jumping into any and every new technology it can to see which one sticks.
About five years ago, MYOB, in partnership with Google, launched a website creation tool called Atlas as part of an initiative called “Getting Business Online.” Atlas enables MYOB customers to create a business website, get a domain name, connect an e-commerce site, and social media platforms for $30 a month.
I put together a series of emails which explains in a logical order how domain names, hosting & websites work…
and it’s free so check it out if you want to learn on that technical stuff!
Because they’ve partnered with Google, the sites promise to “rank well on Google search,” but there’s no flexibility to manage your SEO or integrate with any SEO tools. In fact, for your $30 a month, you don’t get much flexibility at all — not in the choice of themes (they’re limited), adding corporate branding, to connect email marketing services, template changes, and so on.
Back when the internet was still fairly new, MYOB used to have a partner program in place with hosting companies to help their clients run multi-user programs in the cloud. When MYOB realised they could be earning that money themselves, they shut the program down and did what they have often done — disregarded their partners and their businesses completely.
MYOB have gained a bit of a reputation for this sort of thing — starting up, and then abandoning, partner programs. Over the years, perhaps due to the complexity of their software, they’ve tried to establish themselves as the enterprise reporting planning (ERP) software of choice for mid-size businesses, but they’ve struggled with already established specialist brands. The MYOB Atlas website creation tool is another example of just that.
With established platforms like WordPress, which is easy and cheap to use, and highly customisable, this might just be another missed opportunity for MYOB. These website design platforms are built around the concept of open source software and WordPress is surrounded by thousands of theme and plugin developers which provide the integration for some pretty advanced features in an easy to use interface. We made the change to WordPress after going with a Site Builder program which ended up closing down and no longer being supported – it’s a huge waste of energy and resources when you have to start all over again!
Unlike MYOB, Xero realised early that online software is about being a specialist in a given field, so they integrate with lots of different specialist platforms and systems so small businesses can connect the applications they need. I’ll be writing about some of these Xero integrations soon.
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