Posted on August 22, 2012August 22, 2012 by Steve Slisar — 2 Comments

Do you have website insurance? What!

Does that seem like a silly question? If you have a website that you have spent thousands of dollars creating and promoting, it would be quite a logical question.

WordPress is your new shop front

In my work running our online training courses I work with several different websites and different content creators each week. We create and modify existing written content, enrolment forms and training videos that demonstrate our popular MYOB training. I couldn’t even begin to count the total value in human hour terms.

The modern website for many businesses is like their shop front, it provides critical contact information plus information and examples of the services you provide or the products you sell. Have you thought about insuring it?

Hacking your WordPress website

I was speaking with a business owner in the construction industry last week to learn about his website woes. His website is built using WordPress, one of the most popular website design and blogging platforms in the world and like many popular things, WordPress site are prone to malicious attack. Their website was attacked by a hacker and hundreds of hours of design, writing, structure and marketing are now in jeopardy because of the attack.

Free WordPress Backup Plugin

Our online WordPress training course includes a section on a free WordPress backup plugin and this recent event highlights the importance of a backup strategy. The website plugin is called BackWPup (Back WordPress Up) and you can read all about it at the WordPress script site. 344,317 people have downloaded this plugin and it even allows you to create a backup to Dropbox.

While you are there, check out the thousands of other scripts that are also available for almost any conceivable tasks you would want to do at your website. You might start to feel empowered about even creating (even only with the words and pictures) your own website!

While we are on the topic of security, risk and insurance, you might want to check your website hosting service and learn exactly how and when they back your site up. It might not be as often as you think and it might be only the previous day.

Posted on August 20, 2012 by Steve Slisar

Congratulations to our new MYOB Bookkeeper graduates

Our most recent MYOB Bookkeeper Training and Microsoft Excel Course graduates have just received their certificates and going through the records it was fantastic to see how many people we are able to help from all over Australia.

When we operated our Sydney training centres in Dee Why (near Brookvale), Gordon (near Chatswood), Parramatta and Burwood we noticed that students would travel a long way to come to our training centres. I won’t even get started about how they would have to try to find somewhere to park, with parking time limits etc etc.

In looking at our recent graduates it gives me a great feeling to know that we are teaching people all over Australia and New Zealand to use MYOB to help them find bookkeeping/accounting jobs or starting their own bookkeeping businesses. Here’s where some of our recent students live and what they said about the course:

Samantha from Agaston, South Australia

Agaston is near Nurioopta, Williamstown and Gawler

The fact that I could start and continue the course when I had the time. It was easy to understand and use.

Wendy from Surry Hills (Sydney), New South Wales

Surry Hills is near Paddington, Alexandria and Haymarket

I can study at my own time

Beverly from Butler, Western Australia

Butler is very North Perth, near Joondalup

Being able to learn at my own pace online.

Geoff from Epping, Victoria

Epping is surrounded by Bundoora, Campbellfield and Craigieburn

Learning more about short cuts and the really powerful nature and depth available in Excel, particularly in Course 303, was most enlightening and beneficial.
Really appreciate the learning at your own pace aspect and the lifetime course and excellent material content. Thank you so much for such an excellent course presented at an affordable price.

Anne-Maree from Sippy Downs, Queensland

Sippy Downs is near Buderim, Mooloolaba, Maroochydore and Caloundra, north of Brisbane

Nice short videos so you could take breaks and it wasn’t hard to find a certain video if you had to look back over something

Rebecca from Wodonga, Victoria

Wodonga is near Albury on the NSW and Victoria border

Easy to navigate around the site. I liked the short video presentations. If I was interuppted for whatever reason, you never missed too much and it was easy enough to replay.

Carmen from Ruse, New South Wales

Ruse is south west of Sydney, past Prestons and near Campbelltown and Narellan

The sort videos, easy to process and understand the information when presented this way.

Posted on August 20, 2012March 26, 2021 by Steve Slisar

What do Facebook, Paypal and Xero online accounting software have in common?

what do facebook, paypal, and xero online accounting have in common? — Jamie Sutherland

I hope you enjoyed the first of hundreds of new videos that we will be creating and releasing from now and over the Australian summer as part of our bookkeeping academy. Whether you plan to start your own bookkeeping business or find a job in the accounts department, these new skills will help keep your knowledge current and up-to-date.

You may have noticed that we’ve mentioned quite a bit about Xero lately and while we are at it, we thought we’d share with you some information we discovered about the company and more specifically who is buying shares in the company.

Continue reading What do Facebook, Paypal and Xero online accounting software have in common?

Posted on August 7, 2012August 5, 2012 by Steve Slisar — 1 Comment

Video: Reconcile your bank account to your MYOB datafile

We use this blog to provide some free samples of our training materials as well as inform readers about the features of our online MYOB and Microsoft Excel Training Courses. Today I am going to demonstrate the key features about performing a bank reconciliation using MYOB and how our EzyLearn ANSWER student support service helps bookkeeping students.

A bank reconciliation in MYOB is what brings your MYOB datafile back to reality. Your bank statement shows the truth about what money has gone into and out of your bank account and provides you with the blueprint you need to reconcile your MYOB accounting system. The video below demonstrates that once you have performed all your Day-to-Day Transactions a bank reconciliation makes sure that you have entered all the information you need to. At the end of a bank reconciliation your MYOB data is correct and you can start to run reports and get some great up-to-date information about your business.

MYOB releases new versions of their software most years and usually at the beginning of each new tax year to coincide with new PAYG tax tables and they are currently going through a race to the cloud to compete with many new startups like Xero, SAASU, Reach Accounting and FreshBooks. Some times these upgrades haven’t gone smoothly and students ask us how to perform actions in our training workbooks using MYOB. To help students in these scenarios we launch EzyLearn ANSWERS in May 2011 and this is one of the results we release via our blog. There are many other support blogs we’ve written so feel free to search our blog for answers.

If you have subscribed to our blog and are reading this via email, click on the heading to get to our website to see the free training video.

Posted on August 2, 2012July 31, 2012 by Steve Slisar

Exporting Employee information from MYOB

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.

Posted on August 1, 2012July 31, 2012 by Steve Slisar

Did you know that you can use Google to search within a site?

This is a tool that I use all the time when I am surfing and searching the Internet and I thought you’d be interested to learn about it.

My last post was about the new WordPress search field we implemented on our WordPress Employment Training Blog site but it occurred to me that you might like to use a great search tool you are already using – Google.

If you want to search for PAYG and Microsoft Excel information in our blog site, you simply need to type the following information into the Google search box:

payg excel site:ezylearn.com.au/wordpress

You will end up seeing results very similar to the image in this blog post. Notice that you:

Type the word site: before the domain name of the website you want to search
Don’t need to type www
Can search within sections of a website (ie. the /wordpress)

Have fun with this great new feature.

Posted on July 31, 2012 by Steve Slisar — 1 Comment

Search our blog posts for your answers

We’ve written over 200 blog posts since 2008 and we’ve found them to be very popular but some readers have mentioned that it is hard to go back and find ones that they were very interested in reading again so we’ve done something simple. Added a search box. I know, it seems simple but it took a reader to ask for us to implement it. Thank YOU 🙂

While we are on this topic, did you know that we use WordPress to manage our blog site? It’s a great blogging platform but even fantastic for just creating a normal website that you can edit and make changes to as you please. The best part is that it’s open source so effectively it’s free! All you have to do is learn how to use it and we have a course just for it, our WordPress Website Design Course and just like our MYOB Training Courses it comes with LIFETIME student access.

So, if you want to find out the blog post where we wrote about PAYG tax tables and how you can workout the taxes that you owe for employees doing a search for “payg excel” and you’ll come up with these results. See what else you can discover.

Posted on July 13, 2012 by Steve Slisar — 1 Comment

The death of the resume

I was reading an article in SmartStartup by Brad Lindenburg just the other day where he writes about the “death of the resume” and thought that this would be an excellent place to begin a topic for EzyLearn online training students.

We’ve written before about formatting resumes and how they are sometimes read by a machine, but the concept of them dying is a little silly. If you are a high-tech hirer you will be searching for potential employees blogs or Twitter conversations, but if you want to find someone to perform bookkeeping tasks for example you will most likely welcome a comprehensive resume demonstrating your training, skills and experience. Most students of our MYOB training courses have a written resume that they use to apply for positions.

What we have found is becoming more relevant to jobseekers is Linkedin. Although the major social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter are good tools to connect to people with, we’ve found that Linkedin is the place where professionals are often head-hunted because it shows you professional connections and gives high-level hirers a better idea of the circles you “connect with”.

Ultimately, which-ever medium you use the key skill you need is using the right keywords and this will remain the key ingredient until we all focus on the use of videos as resumes. The term resume is here to stay!

Posted on July 12, 2012 by Steve Slisar

Faith, Change, Channel 10 and YOU

Change is a significant factor in everyones life whether we choose to accept it or not and I was curiously studying about Channel 10 and their recent tie-up with Zeebox from the UK. There is a lot of information available at the ASX website for anyone who want to find out more about any public companies you might be invested in with your superannuation fund, but here’s a handful of pertinent facts about Channel 10 that relates to all small business owners:

Channel 10’s share price is at their lowest point since the early 1990’s (which is normally a result of bad performance)
Channel 10’s shareholders include Lachlan Murdock, Gina Reinhart and James Packer (these people are savvy business people).
There was a recent rights issue (new shares made available to existing shareholders and usually at a discounted price) that all these investors participated in (they have faith that Channel 10 will be successful).
Channel 10 have a strategy for moving forward and into the TV and social media space (taking advantage of change in the market place)

I’ve written about this scenario because it is an excellent example of the issues that face every business. The major difference is that as a business owner you need to back yourself, which means you have to have faith and make strategic changes on regular basis to ensure that you get the results you want.

Posted on July 11, 2012August 13, 2013 by Steve Slisar — 1 Comment

ATO says write-off $6500 of capital purchases in the 2013 financial year

There have been some big tax changes this year and as part of our Bookkeepers Continuing Professional Development Program and our MYOB Training Courses we’re writing some short articles about key information that you can pass onto your customers or employers regarding their bookkeeping.

In conjunction with the recent announcements regarding the carbon tax, the ATO has made significant changes with regard to the Tax Free Threshold and Write-off for capital purchases.

Businesses with less than $2M turnover previously had to depreciate any assets which cost more than $1,000 over several years. From 1 July 2012 this has changed to a whopping $6,500. If you buy an asset valued at say, $5000, it can be “expensed” straight away, no need to include it in your depreciation schedule. It’s like an instant expense which reduces your taxable income .

The benefits are aimed towards smaller business owners as it affects their cash flow almost immediately, rather than being depreciated and split over a number of years. Want to receive these tips and tricks in your email inbox? Subscribe now and remain continually updated.

Would you like to see an example of how to manage asset depreciation and writing off assets using MYOB accounting software?

We’ve added new training content to our MYOB Reporting course about how to handle these tasks at the end of each financial year as part of our constant content updates. Make sure you subscribe to this blog to be abreast of all new training content as well as some free tips and tricks.

To find out more, click the ATO’s link here: Small business concessions: changes to simpler depreciation rules apply from 2012-13

Posted on June 29, 2012June 29, 2012 by Steve Slisar

Have you been blacklisted? Remember the fake collar bomb?

We help people earn money as independent contractors as well as employees with our WordPress Website Design and Blogging Course and as a result we learn about internet issues that face our students and customers. We recently heard about something that would interest most people with their own website.

A customer was waiting to receive an order and was shocked to hear that emails being sent to their email address were being blocked. This began a long journey of discovery and if you have a heart for technical mumbo jumbo read on. If you know someone with their own website and domain name pass this onto them because they may experience the same problem.

What’s your IP address?

It all comes down to IP Addresses. An IP address identifies you via your connection to the Internet it also helps browsers locate a website that they’re looking for. Did you ever wonder how police are able to confirm that a criminal was looking at a specific websites? Remember the Collar Bomb Hoax in Sydney?

The modem in your home or office that connects you to your ISP has an IP address. Sometimes this IP address is fixed and sometimes it is temporary (also called dynamic) and it’s very easy to find out what your IP address is, just go to http://whatismyipaddress.com/ and your IP Address will be displayed on the website. Yep, that’s right, every website you visit can keep track of your IP address, even the training site for our online MYOB, Excel and WordPress courses keeps a record of the IP address you log into from!

What’s the IP Address of your website?

Every website you visit is really just a number of website files stored on a “host” computer somewhere in the world and most host computers also host other websites (unless you spend a couple hundred dollars per month for a dedicated server). This means that if another website is sending a lot of spam or even if their hosting has been hacked and spam is being sent illegally then the reputation of your website may also be affected. The good news is that these issues are often identified quickly and can be rectified quickly as well, but they are still a pain in the #$&web!

What can cause the problem?

Blacklisted IP Addresses - what can cause an IP address to be blacklisted — Click on the image to see a larger version

The problem that we recently experienced was caused by a blacklisting at Barracuda Central, but rather than telling us exactly what the problem was, we were given a list of potential causes. See if one of these has ever happened to you? What you might notice as very strange is that the problem could even have been caused by a local PC that is infected with a virus!

As you might imagine there are services available that claim to “protect” you from this type of thing happening again, but they charge a fee. We like the comment made at the WhatisMyIPAddress.com website:

WhatIsMyIPAddress.com does not run, manage, or have any direct relationship with any blacklist. We provide a single location to check the status of an IP address on 3rd party blacklists. WhatIsMyIPAddress.com does not recommend the usage of any specific blacklist and does not condone blacklists that require payment for removal. Our inclusion of such blacklists are for the purposes of completeness and should not be consider to be in support of that blacklist’s usage.

Do you want to read some more?

This is a great explanation of what a blacklist is and how they work, and if you want to read more about a company that wants to help you not get blacklisted read the about us at EmailReg.org.

You’ll be thrilled to hear that the problem was resolved. We asked to have the blacklisting removed, we signed up to EmailReg.org and did some tests, but we never found out exactly what caused the blacklisting and what we did to get of that blacklist….

Posted on June 11, 2012 by Steve Slisar

What’s included in Day-to-Day MYOB Bookkeeping skills?

A short time after we opened our first training centre in Dee Why in 1999 we offered MYOB training courses and our trainers included some very talented ladies Maria Landrelli and Marie Di Blasio. We quickly discovered that business owners and job seekers alike wanted and needed to learn some key Day-to-Day skills so we set about creating the ideal MYOB training course for Day-to-Day Transactions.

Most of our training workbooks are based around case study examples of a practice company. This gives you a real world example of the types of processes that many businesses go through as you learn to perform the transactions using MYOB. We’ve written a detailed description of the journey we take you through in our Day-to-Day MYOB Training Course so check it out and see if it covers some skills you’d like to master.

The MYOB Day-to-Day Course uses a case study of a small business telephone system supplier as they go through the process of purchasing products, providing customer quotes, ordering and supplying products and services, accounts receivable, receiving payments and banking. It’s the perfect course for someone looking for a job where the use of MYOB is required for data entry, or a small business owner that wants to take the next step towards a computerised bookkeeping system.

Posted on June 7, 2012June 4, 2012 by Steve Slisar — 1 Comment

Grandpa Jack is a nerd

I wrote about strategic management decisions earlier this year to confirm our decision to make our online training courses available to training institutions to use as part of their courses. I chose those words because they were fresh in my mind and part of the Applied Finance course I am studying with Kaplan Professional. It confirmed in my mind that the “market” changes every month. Every month you need to improve what you offer and how you offer it otherwise you may drop behind.

I was reminded about this concept today when I ordered my new Samsung Galaxy S3 from Telstra after being a loyal Optus customer for more than a decade. The prices of Optus and Telstra are now very similar and I was have terrible problems with the quality of the Optus network, it was an easy decision to make. While I was in the shop I had a conversation with Grandpa Jack who was buying exactly the same phone and the Telstra shop man and I joked that Jack’s grand kids would look at him very differently and think he was a nerd.

It occurred to me that Grandpa Jack wasn’t really a nerd, he was just in the market for a new phone and a new plan and wanted the best phone he could buy considering he’ll probably keep it for as long as possible. This concept made me think about our online MYOB training courses and how students who’ve been enrolled since our LIFETIME student access started in January 2011. Do they still see the website as a great tool to learn new things about MYOB since we’ve updated and improved the MYOB Reporting, GST & BAS and the MYOB Payroll course?

If you are an early EzyLearn student and have some comments about the value of your course today please feel free to email our sales team at sales@ezylearn.com.au and share your experiences.

Oh, by the way, as I was leaving the Telstra shop I heard Jack asking the shop assistant, “What is a nerd”?

Posted on May 29, 2012 by Steve Slisar — 1 Comment

Online is the way to go according to Woolworths

I was having a chat with a rehab consultant the other day and we discussed the benefits of online services like our online MYOB Training Courses and he reminded me about online shopping and having your weekly groceries delivered to your home.

We dug a little deeper and discovered that Woolworths announced a 118% increase in online sales for the December 2011 half year (July to June). When we went to the Woolworths Online Shopping site we saw all their branding for their Click and Collect service, but entered our postcode in the top right hand corner to discover that they would deliver to your door for $11 or less if you spent more than $100 with them. Do you think that is high?

I remember speaking to an Amway seller back around 1999 when the first online shopping “craze” began as part of the dotcom revolution where he mentioned that they sell all the products that are traditionally in the centre of the shop, the products that aren’t fresh and have long expiry dates. He pointed out that most people buy the same products every time they shop, that if you wrote up a list of things you need you could simply tick boxes and re-order all those products very quickly. Compare that to taking a trip to the supermarket!

A trip to the supermarket could involve the following steps and cost a lot more than $11 delivery:

Bringing children with you
Driving to the supermarket and looking for a parking space
Walking around the supermarket to get all the products you need
Waiting in a queue to pay and have your products bagged
Taking the shopping bags to your car to load up
Unloading the shopping from your car at home

It was at this stage that we realised also, why online computer training courses offer so many benefits over traditional courses held in training centres in Sydney or Melbourne. We recall that we needed to pay rent, wages, advertising and find good quality trainers. We had to schedule the courses 3-6 months in advance and try to guess the best date, day and time for students and THEN if we didn’t have at least 4 students attend a course we had to cancel it because it we wouldn’t cover our costs!

We realised we could give students more training (our current 5 MYOB training courses for example would take the equivalent of 4 full days of face to face training) if we delivered it online, and like a new student said to us just this week, the training is delivered consistently to every student. Every student learns exactly the same information the same way every time so it is great for franchise operators.

The best part is that we divert all our earnings into generating new and updated training content, and ensuring that our online training servers are operational and secure 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This means we can also focus on our LIFETIME student access offer and ensure that students can get on with the bookkeeping and administration tasks they need to do rather than having to do MYOB courses again and again to get the parts they missed.

We believe 100% in online services and look forward to helping your learn MYOB and other programs like Microsoft Excel and WordPress (website builder and blogging platform) online.

Posted on May 25, 2012March 20, 2023 by Steve Slisar — 3 Comments

Want to use Dropbox to replace your USB thumb drive?

I wrote earlier in the week about Google Drive and asked the question about how it compares with Dropbox to store and share files in the cloud. Today we provide you with a free training tutorial video to show you exactly how Dropbox works. It’s simple.

Many people talk about dropbox as a means for storing files and sharing them with other people but it’s also important to realise that you can use dropbox as a backup solution to store important files like your MYOB datafile. It can also be a place where you store common documents that a group of people are working on.

Remember that when you backup to a place like Dropbox you are effectively keeping a copy of your file “off site”. If your building goes up in flames or your computers are stolen you still have access to those files!

A great feature about Dropbox is that many people can share a folder and as soon as a file is uploaded into a shared folder, or as soon as a shared file is modified you receive an instant notification in your system tray area (at the bottom right, near the time, of your Windows desktop).

FREE Outlook Course with MYOB & Xero Courses

The Dropbox Training Course is included as a FREE Student Inclusion when you enrol into selected Office Admin and Bookkeeping Courses.

Watch the video below and start enjoying the benefits of cloud based computer storage. Remember to click on the heading of this blog to see the video at our blog site and subscribe if you want to receive these free tips automatically in your email.

Posted on May 22, 2012May 18, 2012 by Steve Slisar — 1 Comment

Hundreds of businesses already use MYOB hosted in the cloud!

ozBeanz MYOB Approved Hosting Provider for MYOB in the cloud — Screen Shot from ozBeanz website

In our research about cloud based accounting software we discovered that MYOB have an approved hosting reseller program. This is a program where MYOB partners with companies who specialise in providing hosting services so that MYOB users can access their data file from anywhere.

We recently spoke to one of those hosting businesses and took their service for a test drive and it was amazingly quick and did everything we needed it to do. We were able to login, access the MYOB data file, create an invoice and email it via the cloud based hosting account!

[quote]This is a definite boon for Remote Contractors who provide bookkeeping services from their own home, like working mums.[/quote]

The term cloud means different things to different people and Heather Cox from asponline wrote an excellent article about hosted MYOB services. We spoke to the people at ozBeanz as well and they have been MYOB Approved Hosting Providers for many, many years.

Do you have any experience using MYOB in the cloud? If you do, we’d like to hear from you at our Facebook page.

Our MYOB training course is also in the cloud so you can complete all 5 MYOB courses no matter where you are.

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