Mastering Financial Accounting Essentials: The Critical Nuts and Bolts
Most accounting textbooks are written to teach accounting to future
accountants, the creators of financial statements. This book is intended
to explain financial accounting to company managers and investors, the
users of financial statements. As a result, this book will give an intuitive
understanding of the accounting process and standard accounting reports.
This text does not focus on accounting rules and therefore is not intended to
teach accounting to future accountants.
The questions at the end of each chapter follow an extended example of
a new company being created. As the company is created and grows, new
kinds of activities require accountants to record a widening variety of
business transactions. The questions follow the topic in each chapter and
don’t necessarily appear in chronological order. However, a list of accounting entries sums up the year in chronological order.
The book is written as a text for an executive master’s program in business school or part of the business curriculum in a professional degree
program (engineering, law, medicine, etc.). To respect the scarce time of the
student, the most important material will occupy the main text. Students
can read the chapters without studying the questions at the end of the
chapter, but they should work through both the chapters and questions for
a better understanding of the material.
Not every accounting student is enthusiastic about having to learn accounting. Yet they attend the class because modern business makes it important for everyone outside the accounting department to understand the
company’s accounting system.
Perhaps it would be more rewarding to start over and build a logical
accounting system from scratch. If no accounting system existed, we could
design it to meet the needs of a modern business, to be logical, and to be
understandable. But this text must describe our existing accounting system
to be useful to the reader. The reader will discover that the existing accounting system is logical and does meet the needs of modern business.
Traditional accounting textbooks are much easier to understand if the
reader already has a good grasp of accounting concepts. A reader without
prior knowledge may need to read a traditional accounting text twice