Wait for the form to load, then scroll down to see course prices and options for the COMPLETE Training Course option; click on the course options you want to see a running total.
We now have three other options available:
EzyLearn’s Training Video Library: COMPLETE (Beginners to Advanced) training videos NO workbook or certificate from $49
EzyLearn’s Course Funding: Most of the courses listed below are available for our $20 per week course funding
EzyLearn’s Individual Course Catalogue: You can enrol into the individual courses if you don’t need the COMPLETE set from $29
Business owners who need to learn how to use MYOB and Xero like the added support that is available if they have a question that relates to their own business.
Unlike Job Seekers who choose MYOB and Xero COMPLETE training courses to learn as much as they can about these bookkeeping programs, Business owners often have questions which relate to things they want to resolve in their business.
Most of the questions students have are solved as they progress through the logical order of the courses we’ve created but sometimes things get a little weird.
We’ve received lots of training course inquiries from new business in this last couple of months and a question that came up recently was “do you have a course that explains how much I can claim”. The person was asking about how much of the cost of their car can they claim as an expense because they use it for their business.
The answer to this question reminded me of how “flexible” the taxation laws are in Australia. You can “claim” any amount that you want and unless you are audited by the ATO you could possibly get away with it!!
The correct way is to determine how much of your costs are actually associated with your business and use that percentage. The ATO goes on to explain how to do this in detail.
There are many ways to get started with a career in finance and bookkeeping. For those looking for a nationally recognised qualification, something like a Cert IV is a great way to learn the skills you need to find work or continue in your studies.
The Certificate IV in Accounting and Bookkeeping is a national accreditation provided by registered training organisations (RTOs). It can start you on your way to becoming a registered BAS agent, or prepare you for roles like payroll officer and bookkeeper. But the qualification has recently been updated!
As part of our new initiative, EzyLearn Worklife, we’ve been speaking to EzyLearn graduates about their experiences with their course, and how they use the skills they’ve learnt in their work life.
One such student is Ian, who enrolled into both the Microsoft Word and Microsoft ExcelComplete Training Course Packages in 2021. He is also part of our Career Courses Membership, which gives him lifetime access to his course content and student support.
Ian works for Services Australia and we had a chat with him about his work, his course, and all things in between. And he gave some great insight into just how valuable online training can be…
So you’re looking at completing a training course. Maybe your employer wants you to upskill on a new software program, maybe you want help to run your own business more efficiently, or maybe you’re a jobseeker looking to stand out to employers.
Whatever the reason, you find yourself in the position of trawling the internet in search of a course that’s right for you. But how do you figure that out? It can be difficult comparing courses from one provider, let alone from multiple.
So if you’re feeling overwhelmed by all the options, don’t stress, because we’ve put together this guide to finding the right training course for you!
Creating training materials for cloud-based accounting software is a continuous process of improvement. In fact it is much like the process that the software goes through in their Continuous Innovation & Continuous Delivery process.
Two of Australia’s newest billionaires Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar have become wealthy because they created software that enables companies like MYOB manage a team of developers, designers and analysts in the pursuit of continuously adding enhancements, updating the software, fixing bugs and providing support for their MYOB Tax software via their company Atlassian, but I digress.
The reason for this post is because of obscure behaviour by MYOB regarding their essentials software and a recent upgrade they performed on the MYOB Essentials software.
ONE WOULD THINK that an accounting software program that is actually developed by accountants would be the best. However, some believe that the user experience is better with QuickBooks and Xero.
In doing so, it’s interesting to note that QuickBooks, for small business owners, at least, was the clear winner against MYOB in terms of reporting and user experience. But how does QuickBooks stack up against the increasingly-popular Xero? You may be surprised at the results.
THERE IS A FAIRLY SIGNIFICANT gender imbalance for executive positions in the corporate world. Sure, there are notable exceptions, but men in managerial positions in the workplace still outnumber women two-to-one.
But when you look at some industries, like Bookkeeping, the numbers are massively swayed towards the female gender and one of the reasons is it can be the perfect business to run from home.
Recently, I wrote that a lot of bookkeepers are losing out to accountantsbecause business owners prefer the cheapest and easiest way to stay compliant. Rather than employing a bookkeeper AND an accountant to lodge their tax returns and activity statements, many business owners choose to hire an accountant only so they can deal with just one person but are they really getting value for money? When it comes to finding a good bookkeeper at this skill level business owners have the choice of hiring:
Registered BAS Agents,
Their accountant’s internal bookkeeper,
An external, independent finance manager
Many good bookkeepers these days have trained as qualified BAS agents, which allows them to complete and lodge activity statements for their clients and other BAS services. The skill sets of a BAS agent and an accountant performing BAS tasks are the same, so they usually charge the same, but does your accountant really do your BAS or basic bookkeeping work?
Accountants perform higher level duties, such as financial planning, and their fees for this service are inline with what some experienced finance managers charge but when it comes to basic bookkeeping tasks they often hire a junior bookkeeper and charge them out at a lower rate but this rate is often much higher than if you hired this type of bookkeeper directory – so what are you paying for?
Pay for what you need, not what you don’t
Think about your business needs. Most micro and sole trader businesses will rarely need the expertise of an accountant. But hiring one means that you’ll need to stay on top of your bookkeeping (reconciling your account, etc) because accountants won’t perform these tasks — they may outsource it, which can be costly because your accountant will be managing the bookkeeper and adding a margin to their rate as a management cost.
These businesses should instead hire a BAS agent, who can also perform bookkeeping work as well as lodge activity statements and in this situation they could just use a tax agent like ITP or H&R Block. Depending on the amount of work to be completed you could directly hire a junior or Level 2 bookkeeper and have that person perform a lot more of the bookkeeping function and office administration work and with cloud-based software like Xero & QuickBooks and Office productivity tools like Google G Suite the work can be done remotely.
If you want someone to manage all of your finances — keep track of inventory, credit management, etc — and also provide financial reporting and planning services, a finance manager is the way to go as this person can also provide guidance to your office admin and junior bookkeeping staff.
Who does an EzyLearn course?
Lots of EzyLearn students complete an MYOB, Excel or Xero course because these software programs are demanded by employers, but we also receive enrolments from lots of bookkeepers and accountants who want to learn the cloud-based accounting software programs as well as up-skill in MS Office and Digital & Social Media Marketing. If you are a bookkeeper or accountant and need CPD courses check out our Bookkeeping Academy.
Start a bookkeeping business and work from home
Every business needs a good person with numbers and many small businesses and startups are focused on what they do best – and it’s rarely accounting. Learn about the bookkeeping business startup options..
I’ve always believed that as soon as you offer credit you’ve got yourself another business – a credit management business.
When we first created our MYOB Daily Transactions course we designed it to take students through the cashflow process of where money goes when it first leaves your bank account and these are the main steps:
Money in the bank (cash asset)
Buy stock (inventory asset)
Products sold on account (accounts receivable asset – Trade Debtors)
Customer pays their account (cash asset)
The interesting part of this business process to me is the marketing (choosing the products, pricing, marketing message and advertising) and the credit management to get the money back.
THE PURPOSE OF HAVING a CRM is so that when you call one of your clients or prospects, you know everything about them and can start a conversation based on what they’re looking for — their needs.
This might seem a little strange when you think about it because you could be out of date with your info (say you’ve entered old information on this particular client) but, casting this quibble aside, CRM’s are generally a terrific way to provide excellent customer service, on a consistent basis, and this is often the competitive edge that will you need to stay in business. (I’ve written a little comparison of real estate agent CRM’s but I wanted to add a couple other ones to the mix for good measure.)
Accounting Software and CRMs
In the early days, MYOB used every aspect of their software to sell itself to small business clients.
The fact that the software enabled business to keep contact details and search for past orders was a good reason to call the software a CRM.
However, times have moved on and even with powerful and well known CRM brands like Salesforce, there seems to be dozens of CRM providers to choose from, with prices ranging from $15 per month/ per seat to over $150! In fact if you head over to MYOB’s Add-On Centre you’ll find plenty of CRM’s that now integrate with their software.
We are now entering the integration phase of software development – which cloud-based services integrate with other services you’re using – and we wrote an article at the beginning of the year about a home appliances technician who uses accounting software integrations on his tablet to run an efficient and profitable little business.
Real Estate Agent CRM’s
One thing that has become apparent to our team lately (we’re working on social media marketing for real estate agents) is the difference in mindset between bookkeepers and real estate agents and if you think about it for a second it makes sense.
Bookkeepers are usually people who just want to get themselves into their work and sort out the financial and accounting details whereas real estate agents want to find big shiny things to sell and earn a commission based income.
It’s the classic back office versus front office personality style, the salesy and bold vs the unassuming and detailed office admin person.
The thing that real estate agents are looking for in a CRM are:
Quick and Easy contact detail collection (do it once and get all the data) – ideally at open homes
Automated categorisation of contact (Who’s keen and what are they looking for) – often defined by the type of property they enquire about
Constant messages pinging prospects with their brand (like weekly emails about their open homes this weekend)
Great reporting to see what works (so they can repeat it) – like how many emails sent, calls, open homes etc
The relationship with a real estate agent is often brief and very intense because property owners (vendors) will be speaking sometimes every day with their sales agent to see how the selling process is going. With property marketing campaigns in the capital cities like Sydney and Melbourne only lasting a couple weeks in some instances there is a massive amount of information to be collected yet the reporting needs to be simple.
My Preference for CRMs is Simple
Although I’ve had some exposure to Salesforce when I originally spoke to that company (many years ago and much has probably changed) they only offered yearly plans (but showed them as a low monthly fee) and the upfront cost was too high so I didn’t go down that path.
Instead I found some great nimble tech startups (at the time, now they’re quite a bit bigger) who offered software that did all the basics very well and offered normal cloud-based pricing ie. low monthly fees: Zoho CRM and HighRiseHQ
I found that these two programs did many useful things. They:
enabled me to integrate with our form collections (no need for double entry)
gave me the ability to very easily make comments every time I spoke with them
integrated with my email marketing software
enabled me to use tags to categorise and find contacts
offered a low monthly cost!
The Dark Horse in Real Estate CRM’s is CreataCRM
I had the pleasure of meeting Reece, the managing director of CreataCRM, at Cebit 2016 and was amazed I’d never heard of this company before.
When I took a look at their software I was blown away – here is an Australian based software developer who has worked with some of the top performing McGrath real estate agents to build a complete and thorough cloud-based CRM with all the integrations you could ask for, including:
MYOB AccountRight (live and even the old v19)
Xero
VoIP telephony
Email broadcasting
Workflow Automation
The most amazing part about their software is that it costs just $11 per user per month! Now that is a lot of software and a VERY low price. I’m thrilled to be able to share this information with you because here is a company with a great product that focus more on their product development and software features and less on making themselves look big and flashy.
If you have had any experiences with CRM’s I’d love to hear from you and add further depth to our conversation and study into CRM’s.
There is a fairly significant gender imbalance when you look at the people holding executive positions in the corporate world. Sure, there are the Gail Kellys and Marissa Mayers, but men in managerial positions in the workplace still outnumber women two-to-one. Many people would contend that this is something to do with sexism, but sexism, gender inequality – whatever you want to call it – only tells part of the story. In order to understand why there are so few women in executive leadership positions in corporate Australia – and why more women are becoming small business entrepreneurs, instead – it helps to start from the very beginning.
When women enter the workforce, their participation rates are typically the same as they are for men, hovering at around 75 percent; in some industries, particularly clerical and administrative ones, women far outweigh men in the workplace. But despite this, and despite women being better educated (just 30 percent of men hold a bachelor degree, while 42 percent of women do), men continue to progress in their careers, moving from entry level and administrative roles through to managerial ones, while women don’t.
In fact, the decline in the number of women holding managerial positions (34 percent), compared with men (66 percent) is significant. Looking at those numbers alone, it’s easy to write this off as sexism, as men being promoted over women, but the truth is that the decline in women in managerial positions is commensurate with the overall decline in women in the workforce, period.
So where have all the women gone?
Well, at the risk of coming off as a bit 1950s, they’ve left work to raise their children. The reason they haven’t returned to their careers, though, is not for want of trying. It’s because being a working mum is a logistical and, as a result, professional, nightmare. To start, there’s the distinct lack of affordable, high quality childcare, which has reached such a crisis point that the Federal Government, on the recommendation of the Productivity Commission, is trialing a nanny subsidy scheme, which would allow families to receive a government subsidy for the cost of hiring an (approved) nanny to care for their children.
That scheme, which commences in January 2016, will involve 4,000 nannies and up to 10,000 children and, if it passes the pilot stage, is estimated to help the 165,000 Australian parents who can’t work or can’t work enough due to problems accessing childcare. But all the childcare in the world won’t make up for a generally inhospitable workplace culture for working mothers.
Even though almost all Australian businesses are supposed to offer flexible working arrangements for parents, none of them actually have to practice it. As long as an organisation doesn’t blatantly discriminate against their working-parent employees, they’re well within their rights to tell mums requesting flexible working arrangements (such as, starting and finishing later, working one day from home, etc) that their request has been refused due to one of the following reasonable business grounds:
The requested arrangements are too costly
Other employees’ working arrangements can’t be changed to accommodate the request
It’s impractical to change other employees’ working arrangements or hire new employees to accommodate the request
The request would result in a significant loss of productivity or have a significant negative impact on customer service.
Women are more entrepreneurial than men
This is not to say that gender inequality doesn’t figure in the underrepresentation of women in the workplace, because it does; certainly with respect to wage inequality. Although, to be fair, it’s not always men that create inhospitable working environments for women with kids. There’s often a lot of girl-on-girl crime going on here, especially when it comes to mums requesting for flexibility that isn’t also extended to women without kids.
Nevertheless, in the stuffy, old corporate world, usually controlled by men, biology means women nearly always start off on the backfoot. But it doesn’t have to continue to be the case, especially not today. With a society that’s never been more interconnected, thanks to changing technologies and greater access to high-speed internet, women have a greater opportunity to use their skills and talents to launch their own businesses, and to operate them from home.
Mia Freedman is probably Australia’s best example of female entrepreneurship. She’s the publisher of the Mamamia Women’s Network, this country’s fastest growing and most popular network of women’s websites. Freedman launched the company’s flagship website, Mamamia, in 2008 as a personal blog she updated from her kitchen bench – and sometimes her couch – after she left a career in women’s magazines; today, with iVillage and theglow.com.au, Mamamia now reaches 5 million unique readers each month.
But Freedman isn’t the only mumpreneur. There are scores and scores of women launching their own businesses. In the last five years, the rate of women starting businesses increased 7 percent, compared to 1.9 percent for men. In NSW alone, women make up one third of the state’s 650,000 small businesses, according to data from the NSW Department of Trade and Investment. And with the Government’s $20k immediate tax write-off for asset purchases, there really has never been a better time to start your own home-based business.
Are you the next mumpreneur?
Business Opportunities for Ordinary People
EzyLearn has a long, proud history of helping mums to reenter the workforce, and we’d like to continue that tradition by helping more mums to start their own home-based businesses. Whether you’d like to use your talent and expertise to start your own bookkeeping business or work as a freelance blogger, writing posts – just like this one – for other businesses, we can help.
We’ve recently created two new courses – one on content marketing and another on blogging for business – in addition to our other suite of training courses that includes our small business StartUp course as well as our flagship MYOB training courses, which can each provide you with the skills you need to start and operate your own home-based business as a remote or contract worker. We’ve also started the StartUp Academy with a number of business opportunities available to help self-motivated people to start their own businesses, across an array of industries and professions.
We recently wrote posts about the service, Banklink, (generally used far and wide except by the Bank of Queensland) and since then we’ve heard back from a couple of our readers, who told us about some of the problems they’ve experienced trying to use BankLink with their bank account.
Banklink and Credit Card Issues
We spoke to one reader, Anton Prinsloo, who owns and operates CSTAY Budget Holiday Accommodation at Magnetic Island, off the Townsville Coast. Anton uses the Bank of Queensland for his business banking, and as part of his business strategy uses his credit card for all of his business purchases.
Anton has found that while the BankLink service “beautifully reconciles my everyday business account, BankLink doesn’t work with my credit card.” Anton later discovered that the reason BankLink doesn’t work with his credit card is because in 2007 the Bank of Queensland transferred its credit card service to Citibank.
According to BOQ Managing director, David Liddy, the decision to transfer BOQ’s credit card service to Citibank was “part of Bank of Queensland’s ongoing strategy to provide its customers with the best in access and customer service, while providing the full range of finance products.”
“Bank of Queensland customers will continue to have the advantages of a BOQ card, but with greater support, better product range, and more extensive national and international systems,” Liddy said of the deal in 2007.
However, as Anton found out, the Citibank-provided BOQ credit card doesn’t offer thesame advantages as a BOQ card would have, as it can’t be used with BankLink because it’s a service provided by Citibank.
“I contacted Citibank to see if I could get BankLink from them, but because they don’t hold the account they’re not able to offer this service to me,” Anton told us, adding, “I get the feeling they have no intention to even try to resolve this issue, either.”
For Anton and, we imagine, many other business owners who bank with BOQ, this adds upwards of three hours to his reconciliation process using what he calls “half technology”.
Issues with the NAB
But BOQ isn’t alone. The National Australia Bank requires businesses to have a debit card account that’s separate to their business account, requiring the business owner to make time-consuming journal entries in MYOB each time they transfer money from their business account to the account attached to their debit card.
***
For business owners, selecting the right bank account for your business is a decision you should make wisely. Make sure you think about how you intend to use your account and do your research before settling on any particular bank. Be extra certain to find out if your bank offers the Bank Link service and how it will work with your account, so you can save yourself the hassle of journal entries and manual reconciliation.
Thanks again to Anton who shared his story with us. If your have a story you’d like to share with us, please let us know in the comments or get in touch.
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Xero is a great bookkeeping program for tradies who are on the go and using their phones (or a tablet) all the time. From receipts scanning to creating quotes and invoices, receiving payments and keeping track of project costs.
bookkeepercourse.com.au/produ…
Although I’ve had some exposure to Salesforce when I originally spoke to that company (many years ago and much has probably changed) they only offered yearly plans (but showed them as a low monthly fee) and the upfront cost was too high so I didn’t go down that path.
I had the pleasure of meeting Reece, the managing director of CreataCRM, at Cebit 2016 and was amazed I’d never heard of this company before.
