Author: Rosy King

The Xero accounting platform for small businesses continues to evolve and create new features and upgrades for its software on a regular basis. Xero is enabling businesses to better monitor and manage their performance. However, many companies are still not using the software to the best of its ability and therefore not enjoying many of the real benefits.

Here are some tips on how to use Xero more efficiently:

Invoices through Xero

– Set up repeating invoices. This function is great for saving you time when you need to process your monthly invoices.

– Make sure your defaults are set up correctly eg, payment due dates, tax inclusive or exclusive invoicing. Small automations like this save time.

Paying your Bills

– Use Xero batch payments to pay your creditors and bills. Once you have everything set up you can pay multiple bills in 5 -10 minutes.

– Pay specific invoice amounts rather than lump sums – your bills system will be much tidier.

Reconciling in Xero

– Once you are using invoices and bills efficiently in Xero, reconciling becomes much simpler. Most payments will reconcile to invoices or bills you have already set up.

– You can split payments in Xero. If a customer only pays half their invoice you can still reconcile this payment as it comes in, just click split. This function can also be used when paying bills.

Scan documents onto Xero

– Scan or take pictures of supplier bills, sales invoices, receipts and other documents received and upload the file into the Xero library. You can then attach them directly to a transaction, item or account. This will save time and frustration on losing or misplacing documents.

CTO provides onsite training to help make sure you are getting the most out of Xero. To find out more call us today on 1300 667 660 or click here.

For almost any business it can be extremely beneficial to know your way around a design program in order to create collateral and promotional materials at a moments notice. The design and branding you put out for your business is how you communicate your story and offerings to your customers.

One of the most professional options for design work is Adobe InDesign. InDesign provides you with a wide array of tools you can use to design for your business. Knowing the basics of InDesign, you can create just about any type of document needed for your business. The design and branding output is how you communicate your story and offerings to your customers.

Knowing InDesign is an Asset to your Business

Having staff with good knowledge of InDesign is an asset to your business. Knowing InDesign will give you confidence in what you’re producing for yourself or your clients. There are a lot of free resources out there for creating graphics for your business, but as your business grows and matures there comes a time where professional design software will be the next step.

Use InDesign to Streamline your Business Documents and Promote your Branding

You can use InDesign to streamline your internal business documents and promote your branding. Brand consistency is a very important part of your business. Keeping your brand consistent across all facets of your business will help build trust with your audience. InDesign can create documents such as contracts, invoices, quotes, product catalogs and many more with ease. Infusing your brand into both your internal and external documents will tell your customers that you take your business seriously, and in return, they will too.

If you’ve been meaning to get started with InDesign or if you would like to improve your skills to be able to reap all the benefits Adobe InDesign can bring to your business, then why not consider one of CTO’s onsite customised Adobe InDesign training courses.

To find out more click here, or call us today on 1300 667 660.

Are you considering upgrading to Microsoft Office 2016 for Mac, and wondering if you should?

If you would you like to collaborate with others in your team, Office 2016 for Mac now is available with an Office 365 subscription. This means you can not only work offline, you can also work online, with others, in real-time. You can choose whichever option works best for what you need to do.

The new Mac versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote provide the best of both worlds for Mac users – the familiar Office experience paired with the best of Mac.

Office for Mac 2016 is cloud-connected, so you can quickly get to the documents you’ve recently used on other devices and pick up where you left off. New, built-in document sharing tools make it easy to invite teammates to work on a document together. When sharing documents, you won’t have to worry about losing content or formatting, as Office for Mac offers unparalleled compatibility with Office on PCs, tablets, phones and online.

Microsoft Office for Mac 2016 has adopted many elements previously found in the Windows version of Office for better cross-platform familiarity.

Word 2016 for Mac includes a new Design tab for quickly customising layouts, colours, and fonts while working on a document, and the multi-author experience has been improved. There’s a sharing interface at the top right of the app that allows multiple people to work on the same document at once, with threaded comments to communicate.

Excel 2016 for Mac helps you visualise your information by recommending charts best suited for your data with chart previews. Familiar keyboard shortcuts, auto-complete and improved formula builder save you time when creating spreadsheets or entering data. For deeper analysis, new PivotTable Slicers help you filter large volumes of data and discover patterns.

PowerPoint 2016 for Mac includes an improved Presenter view that shows current slide, next slide, speaker notes, and a timer, much like the PowerPoint for iOS app. In the top left, the presenter sees exactly what the audience sees, including animations in real time, for a better idea of how a presentation is going. There’s also a new animation pane for designing and tweaking animations, plus new slide transitions.

Outlook 2016 for Mac helps you manage your email, calendar, contacts and tasks. The improved conversation view automatically organises your Inbox around threaded conversations, so you’ll never have to go searching for related messages again. And message preview now allows you to see the first sentence of an email just below the subject line, so as you browse your emails, you can choose to read them now or come back to them later.

OneNote 2016 for Mac – If you haven’t used OneNote before, it’s basically a digital notebook, that you can access on almost any device. You can organise and share your ideas, quickly search for existing notes, and format your notes including adding pictures, files and tables. You can also share your notebooks with colleagues or friends, so you can work together as a group on tasks or projects.

If you are new to Office for Mac or would just like to get to know the Office for Mac 2016 software better, CTO offer customised training courses to get you up to speed and at the level you need to be at.

Please click here or call us on 1300 667 660 to find out more about our Office for Mac 2016 training.

If you are new to NetSuite, finding your way around the software may be overwhelming or even frustrating.

So here are a few short and simple NetSuite tips to get you started.

Navigating through the application

NetSuite is created with an intuitive and easy-to-use interface, but as with any program, you make take some time getting used to its capabilities.

– Shortcut to your Favourite Pages & Reports

Set up shortcuts to the pages and reports that you most commonly use. It’s just like setting up favourite sites in your internet browser. When you are on a page or report that you would like see frequently, simply select the “Add to shortcuts” option from the Star Menu on the top left of your NetSuite screen.

– Revisit your History

You are likely to find that you need to move back and forth between pages you have previously visited. This feature allows you to bring up recent pages again. Go to the “Recent Records” list – usually found on the bottom left of your NetSuite screen.

– Set up your Roles

If you have a number of roles in NetSuite, set up the role you work in most often as your “Default Role”. This will then be the role you are automatically assigned to when you log in to NetSuite. Go to your name on the top right of your Dashboard screen, choose “View all Roles” and tick the box to select your favourite role. Click on the home icon (top left) to exit the Roles list.

Making Search Easier

NetSuite collates information from your entire company into one place, making it easy for you to find the information you need to work with.

– Using global searches

When you are searching for a name, an item, a customer or other data in NetSuite, the global search bar across the top of the screen is where you go. You can shorten the results received, by narrowing your searches with a prefix. For example, if you are searching for a customer named John, you type in cus: John. This will bring you up with a list of customers whose names are John.

Other prefixes include: sup: for supplier, con: for contacts, inv: for inventory items, emp: for employees.

– Using Quick Search

You could also use the Quick Search portlet on your Dashboard. Here you simply enter in the name or even just the first few letters or numbers of the person or item you are looking for, then choose from the drop down list below to receive a quick result. The comprehensive drop down list includes searches such as Name, Project, Phone, Email, Case #, any many more.

Customise your Dashboards

NetSuite can be easily personalised or customised by each user to perfectly fit the unique needs of their role.

– Easily and quickly add data

With the “Quick Add” tool you can add new records such as events, opportunities, and leads almost instantly and directly from your dashboard.

– Colour Code your dashboards

If you have multiple roles, it can be helpful to colour code the dashboard for each fo your roles, so you can instantly tell which role you are currently in. This is done by choosing “Set Preferences” from the Home menu, selecting “Appearance” then choosing a different colour for each of your roles from the “Colour Theme” dropdown menu. Choose “Save” to record your colour choices.

– Choose your KPIs

Track your performance information at a glance. Add relevant Key Performance Indicator Charts and Meters to your dashboard to quickly and easily see live data for yourself and your team.

CTO provides onsite NetSuite training for you and your team to teach you how to utilise your software effectively.

Our trainers will also provide you with many more NetSuite tips to improve your efficiency.

Call us to find out how to book your NetSuite training, on 1300 667 660.

Microsoft Excel can do anything from managing your office accounts to managing the data required for running a whole county, you just need to know how to use it.

Improving your Excel skills is a great way to save time on projects, especially because it’s a tool used by most of us on a regular basis. Even one little tip can help to save you time, every day.

Time Magazine writer John Patrick Pullen walks us through a few tips to make sure our Excel game is ‘on point’.

1. Navigate Like a Pro

Sure, mice and trackpads are tools of the trade. But if you want to rock Excel like an electric guitar, you’ve got to do your finger picking with the keyboard.

For instance,

– hold down control while tapping an arrow button to select every cell all the way to the end of the sheet.

– Flip through worksheets by holding control while pressing either page down or page up.

– Turn a range of numbers into currency, complete with a dollar sign and two decimal places, by pressing control, shift, and $ at the same time.

– Similarly, you can turn a number into a date (day, month, and year) by pressing control, shift, and # simultaneously.

These are just a few of the hundreds of keyboard shortcuts available in Excel. But don’t trash your mouse yet—it will come in handy for scrolling through all those navigational tips.

2. Flash Fill Your Data

Data entry is the worst. Cutting and pasting is fine; importing is great; but manually keying in values can crush the soul. Thankfully, the Flash Fill feature has helped ease this pain by examining the information you’re inputting and suggesting values in subsequent boxes. That might sound like magic, but it’s really just logic.

For instance,

– if you’re entering a column full of dates, Flash Fill will detect that and help Excel cells make that cognitive leap.

– Or, say you’re creating a contact sheet and have just filled a column full of email addresses, and you start a new column for last names. Once Flash Fill catches on, it can examine the email addresses and suggest the names for you.

3. Think Fast with Quick Analysis

For the experienced and uninitiated alike, Excel is a deep program with a variety of capabilities. But finding those tools can be one of the bigger challenges of using the program.

Quick Analysis is a small menu located at the bottom right hand corner of a table or list in Excel 2013 and onward, that pulls together the basic things that most users do with similar data sets.

So instead of having to go back to the ribbon and find the feature, you just click on to the corner of the table. And because it’s in such close proximity to your data, your mind won’t start wandering through all the other features of Excel, or to your web browser where you’re searching for help, or to Facebook because you just opened your web browser.

In addition, the contextual tools that Quick Analysis brings up can add great visuals and depth to your spreadsheet, making you look like much more of an Excel pro.

4. Show Off with New Charts

Excel 2016 is serving up several refreshing new data visualizations to make your spreadsheets burst with flavour.

The first two are hierarchical charts: the treemap and the sunburst.

The treemap is a giant square (that represents 100% of the values) full of rectangles (that represent smaller portions of the whole).

The sunburst functions similarly, though its round and the inside portions are like chunks of onion, rather than pie slices.

These two charts are great for showing how categories can add up to a whole, and even how smaller bits within those categories can contribute as well.

And a third new chart, the waterfall, is something that master spreadsheet artists have been laboriously building on their own for some time, but now can do with with just a click from the Insert>Charts menu.

5. Look Ahead with One-Click Forecasting

“Forecasting” is one of those terms that’s thrown around a lot in the age of Big Data, but even small spreadsheets have the ability to look ahead and make solid projections.

A new feature in Excel 2016, users can select columns on a table and have the spreadsheet make a few different projections as to how the results will play out in the future.

Displaying the information as either a line or bar chart, Excel will even calculate lower and upper confidence bounds (based on a programmable confidence interval) to show the possible margin of error. You can also fine tune the tool to better meet your needs, calculating for seasonality, for instance.

CTO offers training course that can be specifically tailored to meet your needs and requirements. If you’d like to find out more about our customised Excel courses, please click here or call us now on 1300 667 660.

Today we had a call from one of our trainers just 15 minutes after they arrived at a client site for an MYOB training course. They told us that they had just started to get set up for the course when they realised that the client had never reconciled their accounting software… ever. Our trainer was baffled! What should I do? What should I say?

We said, start fresh! It’s a new financial year, so why not get the client up and running and start the new year from scratch.

Regardless of the current state of your business accounts, we can help! That’s what’s great about CTO’s onsite training services. We are able to come to your office and offer a solution which we can then help you to implement.

At the end of the financial year, you might be thinking about moving to a cloud based accounting software solution. And it’s a great idea, because it just makes working on your books that little bit more accessible and easier.

Enter MYOB’s online software, AccountRight. If you have been using MYOB on your desktop, and are considering moving to the online accounts solution, here’s some food for thought.

So why should your business move to AccountRight?

Well to put it simply, because it will save you time and money.

• There’s no limit to the number of users, so everyone you want to work on the accounts can, at no extra cost.
• Easy collaboration with your team, accountant and bookkeeper allows you to work together on the accounts in real time, from any location.
• You can save up to 10 hours a month on data entry by securely linking your bank accounts to your online MYOB software.
• Easy software updates mean peace of mind knowing that every compliance update and new innovation will be delivered directly to the software.
• Secure online storage means that your data is kept safe and secure and is automatically saved in your online data file.
• You can invoice, check debtors, take payments and automatically update your cash position while you are on the go, with the free mobile app.

We can also help you if you are upgrading from a classic version of AccountRight, to teach you about the new changes and the great new features.

Let us help you make the end of financial year just that little bit less stressful, or help you to completely start fresh in the new financial year. If you would like to learn more about our MYOB training courses, click here or call us now on 1300 667 660.