Real-Life Business Case Study Scenarios

CASE STUDIES ARE the best way to “breathe life” into office admin and business admin courses and give you practical tasks just like in the workplace.

Our micro courses are developed around case studies that provide a relevant way of learning to prepare you with the skills needed in the workplace.

The tasks you’ll perform in these case studies are transferrable to your work life.

They are specifically linked to real life, real time business situations, based on real people.

We have been creating training courses since 1996 and our courses work for people with all kinds of different learning styles. Training course materials include:

step-by-step workbooks
exercise files
educational demonstration videos
knowledge review tests.

We are continuously adding content to our courses, using the ‘Micro Courses Concept’ (or, in other words, case studies). You receive access all the updates we create as part of your student enrolment whilst ever you are within your course access period.

Want to know about new updates and micro courses?

We will alert you when we add new micro courses — simply subscribe to our blog!

The EzyLearn Micro Courses

Below are some of our micro courses and case studies and the training courses they feature in.

Microsoft Excel Household Budget

Learn how to compile a household budget which includes your total incomes as well as regular expenses.

This spreadsheet can be used to help you apply for a home loan or understand how much you can afford to invest in a business of your own.

This Excel spreadsheet template can be used as a personal budget to help you make decisions about your financial affairs.

Learn more about Household and personal budgets case study

Payroll Training Course Case Study

Hiring employees, creating rosters and ensuring they get paid is a big part of every business. Employers need to be setup for PAYG and then act as a withholder of taxes for the Australian Government through the Australian Taxation Office (ATO).

With Single Touch Payroll employers are also responsible for paying the superannuation and entitlements for their employees at the same time they pay the wages.

In our Payroll Beginners Training Course we use a hairdressing salon with 4 employees, including the owner Rick the owner and the procedures and tasks he follows to ensure that staff members are paid fortnightly for the work they do.

Learn more about the Hairdressing Salon Payroll Course Case Study

Advanced Payroll Certificate Course Case Study

Flockana Cafe employees range from young workers under 18 to University students, graduate, parents and older and experienced waiters and waitresses. Meet the employees as they navigate their working hours around the other activities in their life:

Lauren (under 18 yo casual),
Brendan (20yo uni student),
Lia (18yo on junior rates),
Sam (full time employee and parent),
Jackie (29yo paying back her uni debt)

The owner knows when he needs his staff and one of his biggest challenges is to maintain a roster and make sure he has the right staff when he needs them. The restaurant and cafe industry has very strict pay awards and pay rates and you’ll learn about these awards in this payroll course case study.

Learn about the Advanced Payroll Course Case Study

Water Filter & Bottled Water Business Case Study

This case study is for a retail shop that sells and installs water filter systems and rents out water coolers for offices. You’ll learn how to use some intermediate Microsoft Office skills using Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint to perform marketing, sales and admin tasks for the business.

From a full price list containing hidden, confidential wholesale prices to a retail price list you’ll learn to master features in Excel. You’ll create a sales presentation aimed at explaining the benefits of a filter cooler and use Microsoft Word to perform a mail merge reminder letter to existing customers.

Learn about the Microsoft Office Training Course case study

Real Estate Agent Case Study

Jerry is an entrepreneur who starts several different businesses and one of them which appeals to him is to become an independent real estate agent.

He’ll get to promote his own brand with the help of an established online real estate brand. It will save him a lot of money and enable him to keep the majority of the commission fees.

Explore the real estate agent case study

Online Form Builders Case Study

Online Form Builders like Microsoft Forms enable businesses to capture information that they can act on. In our Online forms training course case study you’ll see how a form is created and used as a lead capture tool for a business.

Online forms can be used for surveys, orders, bookkeeping and internally to allocate office resources and participate in events.

Explore the Online Forms case study

Job Tracking and Project Costing to Measure Profitability

Job Tracking, Projects in Xero, MYOB AccountRight & QuickBooks Online Training Courses to report profits for tradies and builders - garden shed

Col Western Sheds

How much money do you really stand to make out of a project and how much has a job actually cost you?

A small, standard garden shed may only cost $600 to buy but the actual cost of putting the shed in your backyard can blow out to several thousand dollars! Things like garden sheds require a handyman or tradesperson (and an assistant) to professionally erect, and that is after you’ve figured out how to get it delivered to your home!

In our Project Costing and Job Tracking case study you’ll follow the journey of a tradesperson who quotes for, and erects, the garden shed on a concrete slab.

Like most businesses, some of the products needed are in stock, others must be ordered in for the job, and others need to be purchased urgently while the workers are onsite. There is a cost in time and materials that can be very easy to miss and make the costs blow out.

If not tracked properly the whole small job can end up costing money rather than making money.

There are rained out days and some things take longer than expected and the business owner needs to keep track of workers’ timesheets as well as cost of products used.

This case study forms part of our Xero, MYOB AccountRight and QuickBooks Online Training Courses.

Learn more about this Job Tracking & Project Costing case study for cloud accounting software

Investing in a Granny Flat (for Intermediate Excel)

This micro course features as part of our Microsoft Excel Intermediate Course (Course 306) or as a stand alone course, available separately.

Australia’s property market boom saw many people explore the option of adding a granny flat to their properties.

Regional areas, like Newcastle and Wollongong, still have plenty of house and land opportunities that lend themselves to building a second dwelling on an existing block.

Sometimes a granny flat is built to house a relative (the proverbial ‘granny’ flat) but just as often they are constructed to be used as an investment to reap a higher income return from an existing property.

Our new “Investing in a Granny Flat” Micro Course is designed to give you the tools to work out the total costs, estimated return, and even expenses and tax aspects like depreciation, so you can make an educated financial calculation and decision.

This micro course is available separately as a stand alone course or is included in the Microsoft Excel Intermediate Course (Course 306).

Wipe Thousands Off Your Mortgage (for Advanced Excel)

Deposits, repayments, principal and interest are common terms to those managing a mortgage on the family home or investment properties, or other debts.

We have created the micro course “Wipe Thousands Off Your Mortgage” to provide loan payment formulas that are included in Microsoft Excel. This course teaches how you, with a little discipline and good use of your earnings or wages, can save thousands in interest expenses — more than double, in fact, than you have to spend.

This micro course is available as part of our Microsoft Excel Advanced Course.

Ad Hoc Payroll (for MYOB, Xero and Excel)

A ‘Micro Business’ is another name used for independent contractors who work by themselves, or with a business helper. These business often don’t follow regular payroll processing procedures because their cash flow and payment needs can be inconsistent.

We have created an “Ad Hoc Payroll” micro course which demonstrates how PAYG, Super and other payroll transactions can be managed with the use of Microsoft Excel spreadsheets rather than with complicated accounting software packages and their payroll modules.

Learn more about the Ad-hoc Payroll Case Study

This micro course comes as a detailed spreadsheet and is available as part of the Payroll courses for MYOB Payroll (Course 505), Xero Payroll (Course 515) and Advanced Excel (Course 308).

Bank Reconciliation and cashflow forecasting for a Messy Startup using Xero

We’ve created a real-life start up scenario centred around someone who has left the corporate world because they want to start working closer to home and choose their own work hours.

We’ve included factors that are inherent to startups, like director’s loans, wage payments and other activities less common in an established business.

This case study was created to provide students with experience in creating journal entries and understanding what to look for when it comes to asset purchases, depreciation and transactions that contain different components of GST.

Learn about The Messy Startup Case Study

This case study is used in the Xero Bank Reconciliation and Journal Entries (Course 513).

Use Microsoft Excel PivotTables and PivotCharts to Schedule Rooms and Staff

In 2004 (yes EzyLearn has been operating since 1996), we operated and managed physical computer training centres in Sydney’s Lane Cove, Dee Why, Gordon, Chatswood and Parramatta.

We had thousands of students enrolling into lots of different courses, at different times of the day and night, and our CEO wanted to know which were the most popular.

Steve created the training schedule each quarter to allocate training rooms, trainers, training resources like workbooks, floppy disks (yes that’s what they were called) and the indispensable Tim Tams. Our most popular courses back then were:

MYOB on Saturdays
Microsoft Excel in the evenings
Absolute Beginners, File Management and using Email and Web Browsers during the day!

In our Microsoft Excel Advanced Training Course we use the actual live data of enrolments for 2004 (with student names and details removed, of course).

We take you through a number of different exercises to demonstrate how we made executive strategic decisions about the business based on historical data and using Pivot Tables and Pivot charts in Microsoft Excel.

See what’s included in the Microsoft Excel Advanced Training Course and some of the Excel Course Exercises files we use.

Corporate Employee & Small Business Owner

Meet Jerry and join his journey as he builds up his first and subsequent businesses.

We base his experiences on real life work, business and every day scenarios as we update our course content and integrate our highly popular bookkeeping courses with business start up training materials.

Jerry is an ordinary man with a corporate work history, lovely wife and kids and wants to start taking control of his own work hours and lifestyle. He wants to start his own business because he has lots of ideas and loves talking to people.

Learn about Jerry’s Messy Startup and The Next Quarter and see how you’ll learn business and office administration using online bookkeeping software and Microsoft Office by helping Jerry with his businesses.

Learn more about Jerry Lame.

The Next Quarter: CASE STUDY on Financial Reporting, Cashflow, Budgets and Strategic Decisions

Based on the transactions in our Bank Reconciliations course AND the BAS Course we follow our Corporate Executive, come small business owner, Jerry as he navigates the world of small business.

We use financial information to see what can be improved, what needs to change and what is doing very well.

We look at mistakes made about funding larger capital purchases and some of the other options available to Jerry as well as other ways to improve cash flow and budgets to help run a smoother business next quarter.

In this course Jerry uses data from Xero reports to explore business opportunities like:

Selling training courses with EzyLearn
Being a trade agent for local tradespeople by providing a measure and quote service in exchange for a percentage of the sale value
Using HiPages as one lead source for the above
Studying a real estate agents course, becoming a real estate licensee and hiring a real estate agent
Comparing financial results with previous period
Aligning expenses with revenue to understand profitability
Valuing a business and selling it.

See the details about The Next Quarter CASE STUDY

CloudPBX Case Study: Daily Transactions for Products & Services Businesses

The CloudPBX case study is used in our popular bookkeeping training courses (MYOB, Xero & QuickBooks Online) for common daily transactions undertaken by most businesses on a daily and weekly basis.

This businesses sell a combination of stock items, specially ordered products and services of their staff (ie. time).

This case study includes training on ordering products and using credit, quoting clients and then invoicing them for the products sold and services provided.

It including providing credit to customers and keeping track of accounts receivable and money owed by clients as well as receiving their payments in one lot, partial payments and even over payments.

This case study also applies to businesses which mainly sell products.

Get and Transform Data in Advanced Microsoft Excel Training Course

Businesses of all sizes have data coming in from EVERYWHERE. Accounting systems like Xero and MYOB keep track of actual sales while the Customer CRM software keeps track of information about prospective customers as well as existing customers. Customer Service software like ZenDesk has all the customer support records while the MailChimp email marketing system has information about customers who have opted in to receive marketing messages from you.

Some companies have a WordPress website, others have a Shopify E-Commerce shop and these content management systems have thousands of plugins that manage email marketing, CRM and Customer support functions – THIS IS WHY BUSINESSES STILL USE MICROSOFT EXCEL.

In the Get and Transform Data case study you’ll learn how to:

Use the Power Query Editor
Group and Filter data to make it easier to understand
Summarise by fields
Append one data file onto another even when one has more columns that the other
Combine information from two columns for a bakery sales report
Produce a sales report by order date and remove duplicates
Merge data from related sources
Merge property data and insurance policy data and produce a meaningful report which shows all property types that have Natural Damage included in their policy

See what is included in the Microsoft Excel Advanced Certificate Training Course

Micro Courses in Development

Releasing Equity in Your Home Loan Mortgage

Using some real life examples from the New South Wales Newcastle property market, we demonstrate how property owners in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne can use the recent increase in their homes to release equity.

We show how this can be used to to buy an investment property in a regional area like Newcastle. In many parts of Newcastle, you can still buy a house and land, carry out subdivisions, add granny flats, perform renovations and get a great solid return on your equity.

Learn more about our property investment courses & training materials

Meal Planning using Microsoft Outlook & Excel

When you have to decide every week what you want to eat it can be very frustrating and end up eating fatty fast foods because it is more convenient. Our goal is to show how using software can systemise the workload, help you eat better and probably save a lot of money too.

Combine easy ways to make healthy fresh food and software tools like Microsoft Excel and Outlook you can make cooking for yourself and your family much easier and healthier.

Learn more about the Meal Planning Case Study

Asbestos Removal Company

Tristan had been working in the asbestos removal and demolition family business for over 10 years.

He then decided to go it alone and focus mainly on the asbestos removal side. Being trades focused, his computer skills were at a beginner level, and much of the lingo used in all aspects of accounting, office administration and marketing confused him.

Our training courses in how to use Google G Suite and Google Adwords have shown Tristan how to incorporate technology into several different parts of his business for greater efficiency and ROI.

We include these real-life business scenarios in more detail and in a logical order in some of our training courses.

What I like about Tristan’s business is that he does a good, thorough job for a reasonable price.

When I received quotes for asbestos testing and removal I received quotes from very slick operators who had all the fancy bells and whistles (their quote was twice as high as ABS) and I also received quotes from cowboys who I thought were just going to kick the garage down!

From such an amazing range of choices, Tristan and his team were the obvious choice for me and I’m thrilled that he has allowed us to use their business as a case study in some of our training courses.

— Steve Slisar, CEO EzyLearn

Mark, the Tradesperson, Starts his Own Business

As part of our EzyStartUp Business Course, we give you the real-life case study of Mark the Painter and Decorator.

This case study outlines the questions asked by every business owner when they first start a business: What should I do and how much should I charge?

The answers may seem simple at first. For instance, a Painter and Decorator just beginning their business might say, “I should paint and I should probably charge a low day rate”.

Delving into this a little deeper, things become more complex, with some people wanting a fixed quote, others wanting broader ‘handyperson’ help, and others expecting a Level 1 painter, complete with all of the tools and licenses for the trade.

Some jobs are small and straightforward, while others are blow out and become time consuming and fiddly; some work is complex and requires fine detail, while some work is basic and low level. Managing ones’ time and how to price different kinds of work — particularly when you may not even know what’s expected of you — becomes just one more challenge in the successful running of a painting and decorating business. And the scenario isn’t just limited to this trade.

This case study explores the use of digital and social media marketing to attract enquiries, how much to charge, and how to clearly define the work to be done, and what to do about tasks that sit outside what you might be comfortable doing.

We explore productivity tools like Google Gmail and Calendar to help manage time, improve sales and customer service, and how to manage the change in your charge-out rate depending on what clients are willing to pay in the market.

We take a look at how you can boost your credibility when starting out, so that you become seen as an authority in your field, and how to get recommendations in various social media from your current work and past jobs and any other contractors you’re working with.

This micro course is part of our EzyStartUp Course and our Digital Business Course.