I’ve tried and tested hundreds of software programs over the last 25 years and I’ve noticed something very interesting in the last 12 months – they’ve gotten so complicated!
Email marketing is commonplace these days and you know it’s a money spinner when Intuit buy Mailchimp.
Email Marketing is complicated
The cost of email marketing software has gone up and up and up and all the software vendors are increasing their prices at the moment. I thought Xero was pushing it with their yearly price increase but Aweber is similar to Mailchimp and they recently increased one of their monthly packages from $10pm to $55pm – that’s OVER 500% increase.
This is a tough time for accounting software firms because they’re competing head-to head for new clients at the end of the financial year. Some are offering $1/month for 6 months (like BillCue), 50% discounts, 12 month low monthly rates etc.
The competition is so fierce between accounting software companies that most of them promote what they see as the biggest difference and reason to change.
Some of these software companies are startups with nowhere near the cash of market leaders like Xero & QuickBooks and one of the US based accounting software companies wasn’t able to process $40M in payroll payments in March 2023.
If you are looking for computerised, online accounting software now is a great time. Just doing a Google search for comparisons between MYOB and Xero will reveal a flurry of ads to capture your attention.
Many micro businesses with one main worker/contractor etc just want to keep track of quotes, invoices, purchases and payments and there are some pretty cheap options available – cue… BillCue.
Bookkeeping is an essential part of business, not just to keep track of financial activities for the business’ sake, but also to meet obligations from the ATO. It’s nothing ground-breaking to highlight the importance of bookkeeping, but lots of businesses might start operating without considering the necessity of bookkeeping.
If you’re a business owner who doesn’t have a background in accounting or bookkeeping, then you’ll want to learn at least the basics quickly – even if you intend to hire accounts staff, it’s great to understand the bookkeeping tasks that need to be completed.
EzyLearn has you covered with out new Bookkeeping Basics Training Course. Let’s break down how you’ll learn the foundational aspects of bookkeeping with this course:
Who doesn’t love a free trial? The great thing about some of the popular accounting software like Xero, QuickBooks, and MYOB is that they provide 30-day free trials where you can use the software at no cost.
It’s great for businesses and contractors wanting to find the right accounting software for them, or for students looking to get experience as they study.
MYOB didn’t used to require any credit card details when signing up for the trial subscription…but now they do. Whilst Xero and QuickBooks continue to offer trials with no credit card required, MYOB has diverted from the pack to deliver this unexpected and unwanted change.
Getting qualifications and experience are the foundational steps in looking for jobs, but then what? It can be a daunting task to join or re-enter the workforce, even with a Certificate in Xero Accounting in hand.
If you’ve completed a course and are now looking for bookkeeping work – whether its with a business or as a contractor in the gig economy – you don’t have to go it alone.
‘Buy Now Pay Later’ (BNPL) services are becoming more and more popular with consumers and businesses across Australia. There are the big ones – like Afterpay and Zip Pay – but Australian company QuickFee is working to grow their presence and stand out in the market.
Since 2009, QuickFee has focused on providing financial services, such as BNPL schemes, to professional firms like lawyers and bookkeepers. And they’ve been successful – boasting on their website that “more than 65% of the top 100 accounting firms and many legal firms” use QuickFee’s services.
Their recent partnership with Jim’s Financial Services is continuing this trend, and the institution of a Buy Now Pay Later service for Jim’s Group franchisees could mean that Jim’s Bookkeeping will have an Afterpay option for its clients. But what will this look like?
Don’t you just love something new? Some entrepreneurs I know call it the “shiny object” syndrome because it means you’re always focusing your time and energy on something new, rather than doing the daily drudge work. But this is exciting.
I haven’t had a chance to speak with every registrant but this image shows the EzyLearn students who’ve completed our accounting & bookkeeping courses and would love to be tutors to help other students understand how the software is used in the real world.
Our team did a little research into job sites for accounting jobs and thought we’d explore a bit about why people like using the major job board in Australia.
The biggest reason is that they are the biggest job board in Australia so most advertisers spend the little bit extra to promote their positions available at the site. But there are some great tools for job seekers to be registered on the site. Continue reading Reasons Why Seek is Number 1 for Accounting Job Search
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:
Case Study: Tradespeople Using Xero Cloud Accounting
Tradies across Australia are getting onto the cloud for their accounting and there’s a good reason for it — many busy people can use the system from remote locations to get their work done.
This means the estimator can use it to generate a quote at a site, the office administrator can convert quotes to orders and invoices and the remote contractor can sign in and do accounts receivable calls from their home office. This is good news! All major accounting programs now offer cloud access — MYOB, Xero and Intuit Quickbooks.
I wrote in the past about Rohan from Painters, Men in White; Ken the home theatre installer and Jason the kitchen appliance repairer. Today I’m happy to announce that we’ve released a case study in the Xero Daily Transactions course that relates to the building and construction industry — in particular a concreting business that quotes for the pouring of a 3 level apartment building. Sue, a contract bookkeeper from Yarra Junction helped me write this Case Study based on her experience in the building sector and in particular with concrete companies.
Bookkeepers Upskilling with EzyLearn
Sue is typical of the students who enrol with us to broaden their skills in cloud accounting — existing bookkeepers who want to upskill. She has a lot of experience in the day-to-day management and accounts for tradespeople and found that she could perform the bookkeeping from her own home at any time.
We’re Constantly Updating Online Course Content
While I’m blowing my trumpet I may as well add that this is an example of what we promote with our online courses — that during your student access period you’ll have access to ALL the courses you’ve enrolled into including updates and new content. This is particularly useful for MYOB and Excel Course students who enrol using the LIFETIME course access option.
Xero Course Student Testimonials
I haven’t posted any new pages with student testimonials to the website for a while (but they come in with every course) but today it must be trumpet-practising time for me because here I blow again! When Sue completed the course, she commented:
“I would recommend this learning site to others and I am thinking about studying Excel next with this learning centre“. She also commented: “Convenient in that I can do it from home at my own leisure. The price was very reasonable.“
While Sue was working with us we put her through our Microsoft Word and Excel courses at no cost and the main thing that really stands out to me is how much everyone benefits by doing a Microsoft Word course!
Use Microsoft Word to Create Xero Courses
Helen from Bright is a registered BAS agent who did our WordPress course and got paid creating a website with out help!
Many students enquire about the Microsoft Excel courses because spreadsheets are complicated for people who don’t know how to use them. However, I never cease to be amazed at how many people confidently state, “I know how to use Word, that’s easy”.
Microsoft Word is used in so many aspects of a business yet too many people think that just because they can type they are good at Word. Things like:
are covered in our 203 to 205 courses (so they are considered beginners to intermediate Word skills) yet I am surprised at the number of people I meet who don’t truly understand how these work!
When we work with a new contractor, even as part of our National Bookkeeping Network, we ask new members to write up an education guide if a bookkeeping customer is looking for a certain task to be completed. We end up putting the bookkeeper through our Word course and they discover a whole new world of computer skills that enable them to do more office admin work for their employers or customers — particularly when it comes to long form documents like instruction guides, tenders and even eBooks which are becoming increasing used in online digital marketing.
Bookkeepers Can Be Great Web Designers!
As I’m sharing so many EzyLearn student stories, I’ll provide another example of a recent student, Helen from Bright in Victoria (check out where Bright is located in Google maps and you’ll see just how far away she is from the nearest capital city — again, the beauty of working from home using the internet!)
Helen is a Registered BAS Agent and has been for a long time. She performs all the bookkeeping tasks that many of our students aim to offer by being a BAS agent, but she is also interested in being a little more visually creative — at least part of the time — so she completed our WordPress Course and as a result we’ve introduced her to some clients. Since then she’s actually been paid for creating and editing websites! One website she created and continues to edit as required is for ANOTHER student, Sonia who completed our MYOB course years ago to help her with her husband’s business!
Sonia now spends a lot of her time teaching mums (AND dad’s) about baby massage and how they can use infant massage to build a bond with their new baby and help them relax when they are uncomfortable. With a nursing degree and a huge amount of experience with children, Sonia is able to help parents and babies alike create a special bond through touch, and ease new parents into the sometimes stressful experience of welcoming a new baby into their family.
I hope I’ve managed to share with you how we genuinely like to support our students and clients in their journey. We welcome your feedback and love to hear directly how you’re progressing along the way, how we can improve what we do, and any other input you may have.
If you’re looking for a new job, we can advise you on our comprehensive courses with lots of content and examples and a fantastic price. If you’re looking to start a new business we can help you with our Business Startup Course. If you’re a small business in need of a good bookkeeper, writer or website designer — we can connect you.
Stay tuned for some new training content releases about Selling Your Property, Facebook Marketing and Intuit Quickbooks.
Outsourced Online Content Marketing and Bookkeeping
What is Content Marketing and Does it Work?
I recently wrote about content marketing and how we have used it for years to ensure our MYOB and Excel Courses appear in Google’s organic search results. I touched on the topic of “who is your audience”, why it’s important and how it may affect your writing style – in reality you just need to write like you are sending an email to a friend, don’t you think – but one of the most important things is to measure the results of your work.
We started using WordPress as our website development platform because it’s relatively easy to use, but mainly because millions of people use it around the world and there are LOT’s of great tools within the platform. These tools are called plugins and they enable any business owner to take control of their website and improve it bit by bit every week or month.
WordPress is like the Microsoft Word of content management systems (CMS) and enables all of the functionality that most people want to see in a professional website, including the capability of enabling a mobile friendly site (important with the new changes in Google for mobile optimised websites).
If you are starting a content marketing strategy I recommend you work at your website every week or two, writing great new content that is relevant to your customers and prospects.
The above chart demonstrates the success we had helping one company improve their organic rankings (in a pretty competitive market). All they did is kept adding relevant text and images to their website that helps website visitors find them and answer their questions.
Want To Learn How To Do This?
Can anyone do this? Yes they can. Like most things there is a formula to success and it takes constant work and regular improvement. I’ve teamed up with a content writer and a digital strategist (could you imagine seeing that job description even 15 years ago?!), to create a course designed to help you learn how to plan and execute a content marketing strategy.
Can a Bookkeeper Do Content Marketing?
I was speaking with Ray from the Startup Academy and we were talking about what makes a good bookkeeper. He mentioned a conversation he had with an experienced bookkeeper he knows who has been bookkeeping for quite a few years and she mentioned that her focus is changing, that she is now starting to spend time on all sorts of aspects of the finance and administration of the businesses she works for. Because of her knowledge and experience she is able to take over many of the other “operational and administration” aspects of her clients businesses and as a result she can:
Do more work for fewer clients (easier to manage, yet still spreads her risk between several clients)
Perform more varied tasks for her small business clients
Earn a higher rate of pay
Can a Bookkeeper Become a Small Business Manager?
Have you read about our relatively new initiative to help people start their own bookkeeping business? One of the training courses we include is the small business management course and we’ve included it because it helps you clearly define the operational aspects of your business plan. Things like
I read a recent article in the Sydney Morning Herald (from Feb 27, 2015, by Alexandra Cain) where she talks about the number of bookkeepers there are in Australia (estimated to be 250,000) compared to the number of bookkeepers who are registered with the Tax Practitioners Board as How to become a Registered BAS Agent (12,000). Alexandra introduces the topic of what type of work bookkeepers do and it’s highly practical for them to venture into many other parts of the business.
Every Course To Be Included in National Bookkeeping Package
This is the news that I have been waiting to announce – that we will be including ALL of our courses and any future courses to people who join our new bookkeeping business opportunity, National Bookkeeping. New members will receive thousands of dollars worth of training courses in EVERY course we have so they’ll have knowledge (and access to a knowledge base) about
Marketing,
Website design, Blogging and Internet Marketing
Content marketing, plus using Microsoft Office Applications like,
Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint etc
We have courses on using help desk software like ZenDesk (that we use), Dropbox and stacks of other short online courses, PLUS we’ll be creating new ones during the year (and the next and the next) that National Bookkeeping Licensee will have access to.
If you are interested in exploring this opportunity further, feel free to go through the Bookkeeping Business Opportunity FAQ’s or make contact with us for more information.
This post has been created to demonstrate simple accounting principles for our MYOB Training Course students. It demonstrates, visually, a very simple fact that is often sensationalised.
I’ve been to many presentations, seminars and watched hundreds of webinars run by people who describe themselves as gurus yet the secrets they reveal are actually just plain old good accounting principles.
One of the great benefits of being a work at home mum is being able to watch your kids grow up while you take some time out to do work. Since we operated computer software training centres in 1999 many of our students have been either working mums or mums returning to the workface after spending many years in babyland and for many it has been a difficult change.
We’ve always noticed that many mums look to enter the workforce in the bookkeeping field because the work is not time critical yet requires a good skill level that ends up paying well. The great news is that bookkeeping is moving further and further into the cloud so you can now literally do the books from your home.
We’re proud to say that we have a team of work at home mums keeping the engines running at EzyLearn Online. Our MYOB training courses are some of the most popular MYOB courses in Australia and we are able to provide them at their current prices because of the work-from-home mums that are part of our team.
Our business utilizes some state-of-the-art software as a service (SaaS) tools available today and we’re committed to helping all work-at-home mums learn the skills they need to ensure that they can have the work-life balance they are looking for. Our Work-at-home mums use VIRION business grade voip telephone services, HighRiseHQ online CRM, our online learning platform and our online student support system that manages queries from students.
Where you live has never been less important than now. As long as you have a good broadband internet connection and the skills to use cloud based applications you can earn a living while bringing up your children.
To those work at home mums reading this blog post we want you to know that we have some exciting announcements between now and the end of this year about the plethora of online software applications that enable you to earn a living from home while looking after your kids. If you haven’t subscribed yet, feel free to do so and receive updates as they are announced.
Stay tuned for announcements of new courses planned in the coming 6 months…
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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…
