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Case Studies and Micro Courses

EzyLearn Online Course Case Studies using Excel, Xero, Social Media MarketingReal-Life Business Case Study Scenarios

CASE STUDIES ARE a great way to really flesh out our course content and “breathe life” into our courses. Our micro courses are developed around case studies that provide a relevant way of learning to prepare you with the skills needed in the future of work. 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.

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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

2 Learn Beginner Level Payroll skills with Trim and Styles Hairdressing salon - Payroll training course and Certificate using QuickBooks, Xero and MYOBHiring 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

 

Water Filter & Bottled Water Business Case Study

Freshflow water filter systems and office water coolers Sydney's Northern Beaches deliveries Microsoft Office Word & Excel Training Course Case StudyThis 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

Find a great real estate agent in Bonnells Bay, Morisset and Cooranbong to sell your propertyJerry 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

Microsoft Forms Online Training Course - Official logo wide - EzyLearn Microsoft Office and Excel Training CoursesOnline 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?

For instance, say you want to put a garden shed in your back yard. A small, standard garden shed may cost $600 to buy. However, the actual cost of putting the shed in your garden can blow out to several thousand dollars! This is because many people require the services of a tradesperson to professionally erect the shed. In this case study scenario, we explore the business journey of a tradesperson who quotes for, and erects, the garden shed on a concrete slab.

Like most businesses, some of the products the tradesperson uses are in stock, others the tradesperson must buy for the job, and still others need to be purchased while on the job. 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)

Granny flat portable building development for investment - smallerThis 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).

 

Microsoft Excel Training Course shows you how an extra $3500 per month will turn a 30 year mortgage into an 8 year oneWipe 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)

TFN-Declaration-Form-300x274-processing-pay-using-Xero-training-coursesA ‘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.

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

Xero Bank Reconciliations and Journal Entries Training Course OnlineWe’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.

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

 

Use Microsoft Excel PivotTables and PivotCharts to Schedule Rooms and Staff

Microsoft Excel Training Courses - Pivot tables & ChartsIn 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!

Excel-Advanced-Training-Course-308-pivot-table-value-field-settings

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 software accounting courses with business start up ones.

Jerry is part of our online Xero training courses.

 

Xero Course: Quarterly Reporting, Cashflow, Budgets and Strategic Decisions

Based on the transactions in our Xero Bank Reconciliations course we follow our Corporate Executive, come small business owner, 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
  • Valuing a business and selling it.

Read more about our Xero Cashflow Reporting and Budgets Course

 

Daily Transactions for Products & Services Businesses

One of the case studies we use in our popular bookkeeping training courses (MYOB, Xero & QuickBooks Online) is based on common daily transactions undertaken by any regular business.

This would include any person working in the professional services industries, and also builders and tradespeople and real estate agents or salespeople. These are the sorts of businesses which sell a combination of stock items, as well as their time.

We use the example of a VoIP telephone system provider and installer.

This particular VoIP business engages in just some of the following daily transactions:

  • Buys stock of common products they sell, service and replace on a regular basis
  • Keeps track of which products are most popular and provide the best profit and also which ones take a long time to sell
  • Buys products from large suppliers who provide payment terms and also deliver the inventory items in an adhoc basis based on the stock they have on their own shelves
  • Visits prospective prospects to understand what they need and use the software to provide quotations which are converted to orders and invoices if they get the sale
  • Includes products they stock, items they buy in as well as the time of their employees to provide a full service to their clients.
  • Gives their own clients payment terms, receives part payments, deposits etc and has to run Accounts Receivable Reports to see how much money is owing
  • And much more!CloudPBX Hosted PBX VoIP Telephone Systems

This case study relates to any person involved in marketing, as well as tradespeople like plumbers, electricians, small builders, carpenters and others trades. It even applies to businesses which sell mainly products.

You’ll find this case study included in the following online training courses:

 

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.

Get and Transform data in Advanced Certificate Microsoft Excel Training Course - merge data from related sources - EzyLearnIn 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

Marions Thair Green Curry Recipes available from Woolworths and Coles and Great for healthy meal planning - Online Excel & Outlook TrainingWhen 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

ABS Asbestos detection, removal, disposalTristan 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

Digital & Social Media Marketing for painters, electricians, plumbers, carpenters, tilers and tradiesAs 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.

 

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