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When Do You Need to Register as a BAS Agent?

MYOB and Xero Training Courses and becoming a registered BAS agent to start a bookkeeping business

Making the effort to specialise reaps rewards

BECOMING A REGISTERED BAS agent means you are permitted to lodge a client’s business activity statements (BAS) on their behalf, each month or quarter, or as determined by the ATO.

BAS agents are really bookkeepers; but they’re ones who have done some extra training and applied to the Tax Practitioner’s Board (TPB) for a BAS agent’s accreditation.

Not every bookkeeper has to register as a BAS agent, but those who do typically earn more as a registered BAS agent than a straightforward, no-frills bookkeeper does. That’s largely due to the way cloud-based software, like Xero and Quickbooks, has made it a lot easier for businesses to manage their own bookkeeping. But even just speaking generally, bookkeepers who have specialised skills always tend to earn more.

So when don’t you need to register?

Continue reading When Do You Need to Register as a BAS Agent?
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Ratings, Reviews, Testimonials, Recommendations

Why you can’t beat old-fashioned word of mouth

social media ratings reviews online word of mouth referrals
Online ratings and reviews have a role to play in buying decisions, but sometimes you just can’t go past traditional word of mouth to find good workers.

ONLINE RATINGS AND REVIEWS ARE a great way to determine whether a business is trustworthy or whether they products and services they provide will suit your needs. TripAdvisor and Yelp have transformed the hospitality and accommodation industry, for example. And Airbnb is doing similar with short-term rentals.

But as we’ve previously discussed, online ratings and reviews can be easily faked and sometimes biased or devoid of useful information. 

Looking for a local? Ask around!

While recently working on a home renovation in Newcastle, I came across a carpenter who had seven employees working for him. Jimmy the Chippy in Belmont has been in business nine years, has no website or online presence — but his business is booming.

How does he do it?

The old fashioned way! He does exceptional work for his customers and clients, who hire him again and again and refer him to friends, relatives, colleagues and so on. He also made a point of networking with local builders and plumbers in the area, who contact him when they have work to do, and refer him to other builders and plumbers as well.

Use word of mouth

If you’re looking locally, and the online ratings and reviews of the businesses you’re trying to decide between aren’t helping, asking a friend, relative or work colleague if they know any of the businesses.

If no one in your social network knows the business, you can also google an online forum like Whirlpool, where members frequently provide fair and balanced opinions of businesses they’ve dealt with — and if they don’t, they’re usually called out for it.

Testimonials are helpful, too

Real estate agents, accountants and many other businesses — EzyLearn included — use testimonials rather than ratings or reviews (except on Facebook), so you shouldn’t discount these just because they’ve been vetted before going online.

And don’t be put off if a business has received the odd bad review. Look at why they’ve received the review and what the business has done or said to address the bad review. Some businesses with a less than perfect record may be more trustworthy than those with reviews and ratings moderated by the businesses themselves.

At EzyLearn we provide testimonials from our students, which include their full name and location, and why they chose EzyLearn to study in the first place. We ask each student whether it is ok to publish these beforehand. We also offer a money-back guarantee and free samples of our course content, so students know they can trust they’re making the right choice.

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At EzyLearn, we’re committed to helping students of our online training courses, be it in in Xero, MYOB, Excel, social media or other courses, gain employment as bookkeepers, generally better their businesses, or even start their own bookkeeping business. To this end, we provide you with a Lifetime Access option to our cloud accounting training courses.

cashflow reports in xero and excel

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. 

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3 Things You MUST Do in Excel!

Business owners and job seekers take note!

learn xero myob excel online training course videos
Excel isn’t just for budding bookkeepers; it’s a great tool for all business owners to know.

MICROSOFT EXCEL IS THE most widely used spreadsheet application in modern computing. That said, it’s also one of the more difficult programs of the Microsoft Office Suite to learn, which is why we recently updated the content of our Excel training courses.

A lot of people do our Excel training courses to help them “skill up” to find a job, find a position better suited to them, or develop their career path. However, Excel is a fantastic tool for small business owners as well.

But whether you use Excel to create a pivot table or a database, there are a few things you should do each time you open an Excel document. Here we present you with three:

1. Vertical align: always centre

Always align the text in the cells of your Excel spreadsheet to the centre, or the top in certain circumstances. But never, ever align it to the bottom. It’s hard on the eyes and, when you’re looking at lots and lots of data in lots and lots of cells, it becomes difficult to know which row, column, etc, you’re looking in. Centre alignment, always.

2. Build error-checking into formulas

There should never be an instance where one of your workbooks is showing a #DIV/0, #N/A, #REF, #NAME?, #NUM!, or #NULL! error. This is especially true if you’re sharing these workbooks with your business partners or accountant or whomever.

Seeing an error in a financial report may cause the reader to doubt the accuracy of the entire workbook, so ensure your workbooks remain error free by using the simple IFERROR() error-checking function in Excel.

3. Print preview your work

Again, if you intend to share workbooks with other people, you should always ensure that your Excel workbooks can be printed nicely and easily, even if you don’t intend to ever print the document yourself. This is easy enough to do via File > Print Preview and adjusting the print margins before sharing (or printing) the document.

However, judging by the number of times I’ve printed an Excel document only to collect 87 sheets of paper off my printer to read the contents one 4×4 table, the function is seldom used by anyone else but me!

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For more Excel formatting tips and tricks, download our FREE Beginners’ Guide to Excel, or enrol in our intermediate or advanced online Excel training courses to learn how to create databases, pivot tables, charts, graphs, and much more…

Read more about our beginners, intermediate and advanced Excel training courses on our website, or enrol to start learning by 5pm tomorrow!

learn xero myob excel cheap online training courses videos

At EzyLearn, we’re committed to helping students of our MYOB, Xero and Quickbooks courses gain employment as a bookkeeper or even start their own bookkeeping business; it’s why we provide you with lifetime access to our online cloud-accounting training courses as part of our commitment to continuing professional development. 

 

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Keeping Tabs on those ‘Little’ Monthly Expenses

Why Excel is Great for Keeping Track of Your Spending if You’re Self Employed

excel online training course using excel for monthly expenses sheet
That take away coffee that you buy each morning should be added to your business expenses sheet; even if not claimable it shows where your money is going.

WHETHER YOU’RE ABOUT TO start your own bookkeeping business, or whether you work as an independent contractor (even if you’ve been doing this for a while), it’s really important to know how much you’re spending each month.

Your Xero, MYOB or QuickBooks accounting software will help you with some of this, but the very best way is to create an expense or spending sheet in Excel — which we teach you how to do in our Excel training courses — as this gives you a far more detailed look at your expenses and spending.

Not all your expenses are 100% business ones

Sometimes you can’t claim 100 percent of your expenses as business ones — the costs of running your car, home internet, rent, utilities, etc — but you should nevertheless keep track of your spending on these items because it will affect your cash flow.

That’s why keeping an Excel spending or expense sheet is a good idea for contractors and home-based business owners. You don’t want to enter your home internet into your accounting software as a business expense, if only 30 percent of it is used for business purposes, but you still need to keep track of it, so you can manage your cashflow.

Monitor frivolous spending

One of the things we love about using Excel to track your expenses and spending is that every little expenditure is right there, in plain view.

This isn’t the case with Xero or MYOB or other accounting software. Your expenses are hidden away, and you have to run a report to get a good breakdown on where your money is going.

Not so with Excel,. If you buy a coffee every morning, it’s right there, in a category you can label as “coffee”.

Now, we’re not saying that coffee is frivolous. Far from it. Many of us need coffee just to function (!) but there are lots of small things we spend money on every day, week, month that add up. When you’re self-employed you need to keep an eye on these “little” things.

Sometimes, you’ll find that you’re spending lots of money each month on subscription services that you’re not even using. Eliminating $15 a month here and there makes a big difference.

Create as many categories as you need

That’s the other great thing about using Excel to track your spending: You can create all the expense categories you like.

Of course, not everyone wants to track each and every expense right down to their last bag of jelly beans — that actually would be a little ridiculous — and for most the most part, you can lump your groceries into a category for discretionary spending, but there are some things you might want to separate out — movie tickets, money spent on lunches and dinners, and so forth.

These things tend to add up, and if you want to keep an eye on them, separating them out is the easiest way to do that.

Back to those business expenses

Each fortnight or month or however regularly you complete your bookkeeping, you can easily add in those business expenses into your accounting software — or your bookkeeper can.

Remember, if you spend $60 a month on internet, but only 30 percent of its use is for business purposes, you should only add $18 a month as a business expense in your accounting software. In your Excel expense or spending sheet, however, you’ll put the full $60 in, as you need to have the money in the bank to cover this expense each month.

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You can learn how to create and manage your expenses or spending in our Excel training courses, where you’ll be able to create your own spending or expense sheet. Visit our website for more information.

learn Xero online learning videos cheapest

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. 

 

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What Bookkeepers Can Learn From Real Estate Agents: Facebook Advertising

Facebook – Great for Local Marketing

using facebook for bookkeeping marketing
Facebook can be extremely useful for marketing to a local audience.

In its decade of existence, Facebook has built up a wealth of data about its users, data that it likes to sell back to those who need it, in the form of targeted advertising. Facebook advertising, though similar in its approach, is very different to Google Ads in what it delivers.

Real estate agents discovered the value of Facebook advertising early, and have used a combination of images and videos to successfully deliver their marketing messages and sale pitches directly to their target market and in order to set their prices. Continue reading What Bookkeepers Can Learn From Real Estate Agents: Facebook Advertising

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What Bookkeepers Can Learn From Real Estate Agents: Sales Pitches

Never Fear: A “Sales” Pitch Can Really Just Be a Conversation

bookkeeping sales pitch
You actually don’t need to be ‘salesy’ at all; just find out how your services match another person’s needs.

After you’ve set the correct prices for your bookkeeping services, it’s time to perfect your sales pitch. It’s good to think about the way real estate agents sell a property to prospective buyers: Good sales agents don’t pitch to the buyer at all. Instead, they get to know the buyer and their needs.

If that happens to suit the property they’re selling, they tell them so. If it doesn’t they tell them that too. Often, they’ll mention another listing they have that might better suit the buyer.

Continue reading What Bookkeepers Can Learn From Real Estate Agents: Sales Pitches

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What Bookkeepers Can Learn From Real Estate Agents: Setting Prices

Don’t Reinvent the Wheel: Glean Relevant Info from the Property Industry

how much to charge as a bookkeeper
As a bookkeeper you can learn much from the humble, or not so humble, real estate agent!

As a bookkeeper, or someone thinking about becoming a bookkeeper, you may be surprised how much you can learn from real estate agents. For an example, take the way a real estate agent has to price a property for sale.

The key to selling a property quickly and efficiently, is setting the right price. A real estate agent who sets a price that’s too high for the market, isn’t doing her or his job properly. In such cases, the property will sit around for many weeks, or possibly even months, until the price is eventually reduced to one the market will bear, sometimes to well below market value.

Continue reading What Bookkeepers Can Learn From Real Estate Agents: Setting Prices

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There is No Official Diploma in Xero

Nationally Recognised Courses in Quickbooks, MYOB and Xero Courses do NOT Exist

Federal Government Department of Education and Training myskills website check on RTOs and accredited coursesA lot of our enquiries regarding MYOB, Xero and Quickbooks courses are from students looking for a bookkeeping job or start a bookkeeping business so when they ask about accredited or certified courses in accounting programs its because they want a qualification or because of what they’ve read on training websites – some of them are very confusing. The biggest confusion that I’ve come across lately has been about a Diploma in Xero! it doesn’t exist.

The best place to find out the truth about Nationally accredited courses is at the official government websites: http://training.gov.au/Home/Tga and https://www.myskills.gov.au/ and if you do a search at either of these sites for Xero,MYOB or Quickbooks and you’ll find there are no results and the reason is simple – bookkeeping skills are the same regardless of which software program you use.

When the Department of Education & Training began the process of regulating the education industry last decade I explored the options of applying to turn EzyLearn into an RTO and decided against it because of the red tape and high compliance costs. I’ve since spoken to managers at some VERY large companies that initially decided to jump on the RTO bandwagon only to discover many years later that it was all a huge cost for very little benefit. This doesn’t mean that RTO’s are bad, it’s just that the business owner needs to go through an evaluation process to see if it is financially viable. Here’s some recent news about RTO’s that have experienced financial difficulty.

Nationally Accredited-Certificate-IVin-Bookkeeping-online-training-course

EzyLearn has Partnered with an RTO for Cert IV in Bookkeeping!

EzyLearn creates, delivers and supports short courses, often called night courses, in the popular accounting software programs for a low cost and with the flexibility of online delivery so you can start quickly anytime (no waiting for a course schedule) and then progress at your own pace. See our Cloud Accounting Courses here.

If you’re looking for a Nationally Accredited Bookkeeping Certificate then learn more about what’s included and the costs for a Cert IV in Bookkeeping.

Compliance Requirements for RTO’s

A great example of one very onerous compliance task for RTO’s is that they need to keep student records for 30 years, 30 years! That’s more onerous that the 7 long years a business needs to keep tax records for the ATO! If you are really interested, take a detailed read of Standard 3 the site that governs RTO’s in Australia, Australian Skills Quality Authority (scroll down just past half way).

ezylearn-MYOB-training-workbooksEzyLearn has always been a creator of training course content and we focus on keeping our content up to date, marketing it, delivering it via an LMS and supporting students – that includes delivering exceptional value for a low price and using as many learning tools as we can (workbooks, exercise files, training workbooks, knowledge reviews).

When students ask us whether we are accredited or whether our certificates are accredited we try to find out what is most important for them: to get software skills and experience or to get a nationally accredited certificate – there is a MASSIVE difference in price and I’ve written this blog to help you find the right course for your circumstances.

Nationally Accredited Courses and RTO’s

Here are a couple things that will help you find the right course and the right training company.

  • Only an RTO (Registered Training Organisation) is able to deliver nationally accredited courses and more specifically the assessments that deem whether you are Competent or Not Yet Competent.
  • RTO’s can only deliver Courses based on the subjects available from a Nationally Accredited Library of subjects

If you are thinking about doing a Nationally Accredited Course check out whether that training provider is listed at this site: http://training.gov.au/Search. While you are at it see if the course they advertise is also listed.

Diplomas are Available for Accounting: Check your RTO

Satisfaction and Labour marketing information for bookeeping jobs if you have a Cert IV in BookkeepingSee if you can find a Diploma in Xero, or MYOB or Quickbooks? The answer is no, because their isn’t one. What some training companies offer is a Cert IV in Bookkeeping or a Diploma in Accounting and they may focus on using Xero or MYOB or other software but if that is the case you should delve a little deeper into the RTO and see how good they really are. If you search the training.gov.au website you’ll be able to see all of the information about every RTO. The Investment Banking Institute in Melbourne is a highly regarded RTO for the provision of financial services and bookkeeping courses and when you visit their Official Organisation Details page you can see the courses on their “scope”, their contact details and if there are any restrictions on the training they deliver.

If you are really that interested in learning more about accreditation and accredited courses you should take a look at the Cert IV in Bookkeeping. There are 24 available courses but an RTO only needs to deliver 13, of which 6 are core units. That means that apart from the core subjects EVERY RTO is able to mix and match with 18 of the potential elective subjects. I’m not the best at statistics but this means there are LOTS of potential combinations of subjects that can make up a Cert IV in Bookkeeping.

See my conclusion and references for examples of the type of information a good RTO will make available about the student satisfaction (Quality Reporting Indicators).

Accreditation by the Software Company: MYOB, QuickBooks, Xero

Online bookkeeping cloud accounting services using MYOB, Quickbooks and XeroAnother type of accreditation are those offered by the software companies but let’s be honest, these services are revenue raising “partner” programs and the more “paying” partners a software company has the more money they earn and the more exposure to clients they have. I recall when MYOB was in it’s early days (and still called Data Tech) that the main requirements to become a partner where to do at least 3 installations – but there was not training or quality control beforehand, it was almost like you had to wing it and if you did 3 then you were rewarded with a partner status!

In those early days EzyLearn delivered MYOB courses and some of the students who came along shared experiences about “MYOB Certified Consultants” who just flew in, set everything up and then flew out leaving a mess that often they wouldn’t fix. These consultants made themselves appear like super heroes who could only possibly come for one day at a time (they were booked out for months of course and charged a fortune). The company’s accountant or accounting staff were usually left to clean up the mess and make everything right. Sure,things may have changed these days and the standards imposed by the software companies are much higher but to me this accreditation is one of the last places a bookkeeper should turn to – and the last accreditation an employer should look for.

The best accreditation in my mind is accreditation (or certification) by the industry and that’s normally delivered by not-for-profit associations that aim to increase the education and compliance of their members.

Accredited by the Industry

Accredited online MYOB training course and support institute of certified bookkeepersThere are several associations for bookkeepers who want to become Registered BAS Agents but the most progressive is the Institute of Certified Bookkeepers. This organisation came from the UK where they are still a leading member group, when the Australian Bookkeeping Industry began the process of regulation and they recognised the benefit of letting their partners use their logo to demonstrate their membership status.

We spend over $1000 pa on this membership but we do it because our students are then able to join the Institute as student members.

Conclusion

Firstly,I did NOT see myself writing all this.

Secondly if it’s important for you to receive a nationally accredited qualification do some basic research in the company delivering the courses and make sure they are an RTO and not just using words like Diploma in Xero to confuse you and finally check out the subjects that they include in their Cert IV, you may find one company’s Cert IV is better than another.

MYOB Training Courses with 30 Day money back guaranteeFinally, If you decide you just want to learn how to use the software using practical exercises and following step by step processes that are performed in most companies everyday then enrol into one of our EzyLearn courses. The Certificate we provide is a Certificate of Completion once all our Knowledge Reviews have been completed successfully and these knowledge reviews are at the end of each section of each course. In the MYOB course we have 5 courses.

The best guarantee I can offer is a 30 day money back guarantee. Happy Learning

 

Some other references you may find interesting:

 

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Are You a Bookkeeper Who Needs More Clients? Want My Advice?

If you are a bookkeeper, selling online MYOB and Xero training courses could be a perfect complement to your bookkeeping business!

FINDING PROSPECTS AND converting them into clients involves selling and most of us hate doing it, but wait…

For those of us in small business, be it as a bookkeeper, real estate agent, sales rep, virtual assistant or the like, most of us are selling every day of our lives.

This means we get pretty good at it. We develop techniques that we can replicate and that become part of our daily lives.

The process of selling is really no longer about selling per se; it becomes about a systemised process of:

Continue reading Are You a Bookkeeper Who Needs More Clients? Want My Advice?
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Watching the US Election? You May Need to Change the Set of Your Sail

politics-is-part-of-the-wind-that-blows-but-what-affects-your-success-is-how-you-set-your-sail-a-quote-from-jim-rohn-start-a-bookkeeping-businessI’m not one to blog about politics; there are enough people doing that already. However, I couldn’t help but be reminded of something I heard in an audio cassette by Jim Rohn, who I referred to in an earlier blog about starting a bookkeeping business. I’ll paraphrase it here in my own words:

Circumstances around you, changes in the weather, in politics, at your work, are all the wind that blows. Things will change and much of it is beyond your control so you AND everyone else just has to live with it. What you can control is how you think, the goals you set and the things you DO with what you know. Jim Rohn calls this the ‘Set of the Sail’.

Take a look at this video; hear him speak. One of the things I like most about Jim Rohn is that he doesn’t mince words. He speaks simply and plainly with very clear concepts:

However, while I am making mention of the recent US election and politics, Politico.com is a website with awesome visualisations of how results transpire. Enjoy 🙂

Here’s the audio about the wind that blows and the set of your sail. I hope it helps no matter what the result of this or any election. It’s also extremely relevant to anybody working in business.

— Steve Slisar, MD, EzyLearn

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Bad Payers Cost 12 Working Days to Collect $13,200

flowchart of the cash conversion cycle

Credit Management is an Extra Job

credit-management-training-assessment-management-and-enforcement

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:

  1. Money in the bank (cash asset)
  2. Buy stock (inventory asset)
  3. Products sold on account (accounts receivable asset – Trade Debtors)
  4. 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.

Continue reading Bad Payers Cost 12 Working Days to Collect $13,200
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Xero now looks like Quickbooks Online and MYOB needs an upgrade

Xero, Quickbooks and the plus button

xero-dashboard-is-starting-to-look-like-the-quickbooks-online-dashboard-xero
The Plus button in Xero

We’re currently completing new, updated content for our Xero courses and one thing stood out more than anything else – the PLUS button in the top right hand corner! If you are familiar with Intuit Quickbooks you’d immediately recognise that their PLUS in the top centre of the screen is how you access most of the software’s features and I’ve always liked how easy it makes navigating the software. If you compare the two of them you may think that the Xero software still has some way to come.

The other thought I had about this change is “how much will Xero change its user interface”? People get used to how to navigate around a software program (User Experience) and don’t want things to change too much and that has been a great feature about MYOB – their navigation has remained fairly consistent for two decades.

Will cloud services be upgraded like their computer software peers of the naughties?

Microsoft might be the inspiration for change for Xero because although most of the formulas and functions in Microsoft Excel remain the same, the way you navigate around the software changes every 3-6 years. This is a boon for the larger software training companies that charge extra for courses in the different versions (we include all versions for the one price of course 😉 but it can be frustrating for staff who have to re-learn how to navigate the software and their spreadsheets when the office software is updated.

xero-dashboard-is-starting-to-look-like-the-quickbooks-online-dashboard-quickbooks
The PLUS menu in Quickbooks has more features

While we are on the topic of upgrades and how annoying they are I received an email from my accountant to upgrade the MYOB version that we share so that she can access the files to work on them! I can say for sure that I once again felt that MYOB are behind the timeline as they fight to stay in control when looking at how they develop their software compared to the other accounting programs like Xero and Quickbooks where the software is updated and live.

Testimonials for Xero, MYOB and Microsoft Excel courses

On a different note, I asked our web guy to get some information about where our students are located around Australia and at the same time get some of their testimonials quotes onto our website. He’s not finished yet, but when I see the different suburbs from all over Australia I reflect on the same picture over 10 years ago when we were operating physical training centres in Sydney’s North Shore, Northern Beaches and Parramatta and our students were located within 20kms of each centre.

It’s a wonderful feeling to see students doing our courses from all over Australia but it’s even better when we see enrolments from UK, Canada, US and Hong Kong because it shows the true power of cloud based services.

When you want to become a Registered BAS Agent

Start a bookkeeping business not a franchiseLast week I wrote about starting a bookkeeping business while you are working your day job and I just want to add a note that may be very useful for those who want to become a registered BAS agent. National Bookkeeping offer a BAS lodgement service through our licensees and it is a great way for qualified bookkeepers (who have their Cert IV in Bookkeeping or Accounting) to work with an organisation and build up the hours they need to register as a BAS agent via the Tax Practitioners Board.

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Announcement: Learn about every person who touches your property before it sells

I’ve created some education guides for real estate agents

Selling Your Property Information Guide 2 - Learn about every person who touches your property before it sellsIf you’ve read my recent blogs about the free WordPress training video for Youtube and real estate agents or Facebook Advertising for real estate agents you’d get the feeling I’ve been pretty submersed in the real estate industry! Well, you’re right and the good news is that if you’re a bookkeeper looking to start your own bookkeeping business this will help when I start sharing what I’ve learnt about the sales techniques used by real estate agents to sell property – it could help you sell your bookkeeping services.

For now I just want to share with you the news about our latest education guide on selling your property – it’s yours for free and has all the steps in the real estate sales process from the sales contract to settlement.

About the Selling Your Property Education Guide

Now, just to be clear we’ve done a LOT of research to come up with this guide because we make it available to the real estate agents that use our Digital Marketing services over at virion. Real estate agents can use this guide as a giveaway as part of their “Call-to-action and Lead Capture“. In creating this Education Guide we interviewed:

  • real estate agents,
  • property valuers
  • conveyancers,
  • property owners,
  • property stylists,
  • photographers,
  • video producers
  • auctioneers,
  • building and pest inspectors
  • tradies
  • online marketing experts, and more

Winter is the perfect time to plan your property sale

Spring is the season that is most often touted as the best time to sell your property. Property buyers start coming out of their homes after the chilly winter to go and inspect properties at open houses and most people want a sale to be made before Christmas. If you’re one of these people looking to sell then this guide will explain why you need to start preparing now. Here’s what we’ve included in this guide, our table of contents:

Selling Your Property Information Guide 2 - Learn about every person who touches your property before it sells - Table of Contents

If you are a real estate agent you can use this

Content marketing has been my marketing method of choice since 2008 after we spent a lot of money on Google Adwords and other advertising methods to try to attract students to our online training courses. I like content marketing because people (like you) get to know a bit more about us, you get to see the quality of our work and over time (after over 500 blog posts!) you get to see my commitment to EzyLearn and EzyLearn students. This is the type of commitment I believe real estate agents will need to make to stand out from the crowd and become more relevant in a digital age.

I’ve been fortunate to work with Derek Farmer (real estate agent in Sydney’s Lower North Shore) who understands the need for agents to change the way they come across. He spent tens of thousands of dollars to create a series of educational videos about each of the steps in the property selling process because he wants his vendors to understand each of the steps. He also realised that he was spending a lot of time explaining what goes on during the selling process and created the videos to share his experiences in these situations and inform vendors about how they can deal with their emotion and what decisions they can make when these situations arise.

If you’re a real estate agent and you want to re-brand our “Selling Your Property” Education guide please make contact with us via our Digital Agency (virion). Happy preparations!

Facebook Course - 1 Creating a Facebook Page COVER PageComing Up… The Facebook Page Checklist

Facebook is one of the tools that real estate agents are jumping onto as quickly as they can and there’s a good reason for it demographic targeting – they can promote their brand to every person who lives within 2km of their office or “sales patch”. Bookkeepers or any other businesses can also use this targeting for their marketing and we’re putting the finishing touches on our Facebook Page Checklist AND our first Facebook for Business Course – Setting Up Your Facebook Page.

We’ll be giving away the Checklist for free so make sure you subscribe to receive it via email.

 

 

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If you have fewer than 19 staff you must be SuperStream Ready by June 30

Companies with over 20 employees should ALREADY be compliant

ATO SuperStream for myob and xero accounting software training coursesIn July last year, EzyLearn published a couple of posts about SuperStream, the government initiative to improve the efficiency of Australia’s superannuation system, which all businesses with 19 or fewer employees must be compliant with by June 30 this year. As we’ve now reaching June 30, it’s important to ensure that you’re fully compliant with SuperStream, the government’s electronic system for sending superannuation payments to your employees’ super funds.
Continue reading If you have fewer than 19 staff you must be SuperStream Ready by June 30

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Bank Recs is BAS preparation but lodgement is legal

Due dates for BAS lodgement can be deferred by BAS agents

Due dates for lodging BAS's and extensions for BAS Agents using the BAS Agent portal - Bank Recs do most of the work
Image: ATO website

If you’re doing your BAS with the help of a Tax or BAS agent you might be aware that although the actual due date for the March quarter BAS is 28th April you can get an extension by using a tax or BAS agent to the 26th of May.

We’ve had quite a few conversations lately with bookkeepers about whether they can do this or not and if not who can they turn to, to do it.

When you lodge a BAS with the ATO you are effectively telling them how much you’ve earnt and spent but more importantly you are defining how much the business actually pays in tax – and they DON’T want you to get this amount wrong.

If the amount is wrong and in your favour you may incur fees and charges and the TAX and BAS agent system (that is managed by the Tax Practitioners Board) has been set up to assume that only someone who has the training and experience is responsible for lodging these important documents. If they get it wrong a small business owner can sue them for the time it takes to fix the problem and for this BAS agents need professional indemnity insurance.

Non-registered Bookkeepers and BAS Agents

xero-myob-learn-with-ezylearn

The good news for both businesses AND ordinary bookkeepers who are NOT registered BAS agents is that you can have a bookkeeper do your data entry, as well as help you with various aspects of your business accounts and administration (like accounts payable, receivable and even customer service etc) for a good, low rate.

All you need it confidence in using MYOB or Xero accounting software. Our Xero Complete course will teach you everything from setup and configuration through daily transactions like invoices, purchases, expenses and payments and advanced topics like BAS, Reporting, Payroll, Projects and cashflow reporting.

Many of these bookkeepers operate as independent contractors so the small business doesn’t need to employ a staff member to do the books [want to start your own bookkeeping business cheaply? Look at joining National Bookkeeping] and some of them are very experienced in bookkeeping and even running their own businesses.

The good news is that you can still use one of these bookkeepers to take care of the accounts side of your business and use your accountant or a BAS agent for the BAS preparation and lodgement.

Bank reconciliation done right is where all the work is done

Now we have the BAS lodgement details out of the way let’s get into the bank reconciliation. This work is often done by the accounts person or contractor and it’s where most of the time and effort in preparing a BAS is spent. If this is done correctly the BAS preparation is pretty simple so it made us delve a little further into the steps taken in doing this work. Here are the simple steps:

  1. Launch your accounting software
  2. Go to the bank reconciliation area
  3. Start matching entries in your software with lines on the bank statement (much easier and faster with bank feeds and Internet banking).
  4. Reconcile each month
  5. Run your BAS report

Many people at this stage will need to provide copies of their bank statement to their accountant, BAS agent or bookkeeper so that person can see actually real world evidence of that transaction (sometimes bank feeds are perfect either). It’s at this stage that you realise whether you made the right choice in the bank you choose because not all banks are equal in Australia even if they are grouped as the BIG four. I’ve written about my disappointment in how hard it is to use a bank like NAB before and I’m afraid I’m gong to have to do it again, comparing NAB to CBA for the ease of getting bank statements.

Bank Statements and Internet Banking – Bad news NAB

CBA Netbank easy to get past statements up to 7 years old compared to NAB business banking

CBA provide 7 years of storage for bank statements so if you do have to go back and get an old one guess what? No calls to make, not bank statement fees to pay, no need to search through your filing cabinat for paper statements, all you need to do is go back to that period and download the file as a PDF and email it to your accountant or bookkeeper.

NAB is too old, statements are hard to get and customer service needs to change with statement search

To do this with NAB is very similar to walking into one of their branches (well the one they just closed down at Dee Why anyway) – it’s old, clunky and hard to work with and often I’ve found you need to email or call or do physical searching around your office for this rudimentary information – this task alone can make the whole bank reconciliation experience very frustrating.

Do your end of year reports now

facebook marketing and advertising course online

While we are on the topic of reporting you may be aware that there are some tax deductions and expenses that you can claim this financial year so it’s a good time to know exactly how you have performed this financial year. Plus you’ll see how far short or ahead you are from last year and you can do your own Jerry Harvey style clearance sale – everything has to go, go, go because we have TOO MUCH stock.

We’re preparing some blogs that’ll be published shortly about some of the deductions and tax breaks you might want to take advantage of. Hopefully after these we’ll be able to focus on our online digital marketing courses like Facebook Pages for business and Facebook advertising for real estate agents! Every one will benefit from these Facebook courses but we’ll slant towards how real estate agents can use Facebook to attract vendors in their local area – it’s fascinating.

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What’s your career preference? Bookkeepers vs. Real Estate Agents

Choice of sales vs administration work

Components of choosing a career path include education, experience and skills - MYOB and Excel are important skills for office workThey say that, in life, nothing is certain but death and taxes. If you live in Australia, however, it’s fair to say that nothing is certain but death, taxes and real estate, since selling property seems to be the national pastime (Sky News does broadcast live auctions every Saturday now, thanks to a new partnership with REA Group). Since real estate agents and bookkeepers share a thing or two in common (they both handle the two most important aspects of their clients’ livelihoods), we thought we’d look into compliance for both professions.

Until 2010, when the Tax Agent Services Act was established in 2009, any person with a reasonably good understanding of an accounting software package, like MYOB, could provide bookkeeping and tax services to clients. With the introduction of the Tax Services Act, however, a bookkeeper wishing to provide tax services to their clients was required to register with the Tax Practitioners board (TPB), which has its own criteria that applicants must satisfy in order to register.

Although a bookkeeper who isn’t registered with the TPB can still provide general data entry services to their clients, by law, only a registered BAS or tax agent can lodge activity statements or tax returns on behalf of their clients. We’ve written about how a bookkeeper can become registered with the TPB before on this blog, so we’re not going to cover that here. Instead, we’re going to look at the compliance requirements for real estate agents and bookkeepers, which for the sake of clarity, we’re going to refer to as BAS and tax agents moving forward.

BAS AND TAX AGENTS

COMPLIANCE REQUIREMENTS

SKILLS
Completion of Certificate IV in Financial Services (Bookkeeping or Accounting) or higher – 12 month course Proficiency in major accounting software packages – MYOB, Xero, Quickbooks, etc
Register as a BAS and/or tax agent with the Tax Practitioners Board Excellent time management skills
Become a member of a professional organisation, like the Institute of Certified Bookkeepers (optional) Multi-tasking skills – ability manage multiple clients at once
Satisfy continuing professional education (CPE) requirements, per the TPB. Have excellent customer service skills
Specialist skills in a particular industry – i.e., building and construction (optional)

Now, let’s turn our attention to real estate agents.

Derek Farmer real estate agent smiling portrait in selling your property educational training videoBefore we continue, it’s necessary to mention that there are two different kinds of real estate agents, just as there are bookkeepers. When an agent begins their career, they usually complete a short course (approximately three days) that allows them to work as as an agent’s representative. An agent’s representative works under the guidance of a fully licensed real estate agent, and is allowed to assist on a variety of real estate transactions, but is not, by law, legally allowed to carry out real estate transactions for a client unsupervised.

A licensed real estate agent, on the other hand, has fulfilled a more extensive set of educational requirements, which is necessary if they are to carry out a real estate transaction unsupervised or operate their own agency. In Australia, there is no national piece of legislation governing real estate, as it is, instead, overseen by each state or territory government, which are responsible for licensing real estate agents via the relevant department of fair trading, consumer affairs or protection. Licensing requirements vary state-to-state, albeit only minimally, so for the sake of this blog post, we’re going to refer to the licensing requirements as laid out by the NSW Department of Fair Trading.

LICENSED REAL ESTATE AGENTS

COMPLIANCE

SKILLS
Completion of Certificate IV in Property Services (real estate) -18 month course Proficiency in major software applications – MS Word, Outlook, etc
Obtain real estate license from Dept. Fair Trading Excellent time management skills
Obtain auctioneer’s license from Dept. Fair Trading Multi-tasking skills – ability to manage multiple clients at once
Become member of professional association, like Real Estate Institute of NSW (optional) Skilled negotiator and sales person
Satisfy continuing professional education (CPE) requirements, per Dept. Fair Trading Excellent customer service skills
Specialist knowledge – i.e., local area, commercial/residential/regional real estate, etc
Excellent networking skills
Understanding of marketing and advertising

As the two tables show, BAS and tax agents are just as educated – and must remain to be so, if they hope to stay registered – as real estate agents. This may come as a surprise to many people, given the long held assumption has always been that real estate agents are uneducated, but that’s clearly not the case – nor has it ever been so, unlike BAS and tax agents who only recently had to meet a minimum educational requirement.

Bookkeepers, BAS and tax agents need to do what real estate agents do

Indeed, although the compliance requirements of both professions are similar, there’s quite a disparity in the skill sets of BAS and tax agents when compared with real estate agents. The latter are skilled negotiators with excellent sales skills, who also have a thorough understanding of marketing and advertising, which, along with networking, they use to get new listings. Few BAS and tax agents, however, have much knowledge of marketing and advertising, and most of them confess that they aren’t very good at sales (and really don’t want to do that type of work).

This is okay if they work for a well-known specialist tax franchise, like HR Block, which already has a name for itself and has a marketing department in its head office to oversee the group marketing and advertising needs. But an independent BAS and tax agent working from home, which most of EzyLearn’s students and readers do, don’t have those resources at their disposal. They need to find their own clients and do their own marketing, just like real estate agents do.

OR, someone else can do the marketing for you

Start a bookkeeping business not a franchiseIf you’re a registered BAS or tax agent (or both!), and you’d like to learn more about sales and marketing so you can grow your client list and your business, become a National Bookkeeping licensee. As a National Bookkeeping licensee, you’re provided with all the resources you need to operate your own bookkeeping business, particularly how to market your business to get new clients. Visit the National Bookkeeping website or make contact to discuss for more information.