Guides on the Essentials

The first guide I've written for you is a little primer on how to understand debits and credits. Debits and credits are absolutely fundamental to financial accounting. If you don't understand this from the very beginning, you'll have a tough time in the class.

Read it and read it again. Read it until you can recite in your sleep which accounts are debited and which are credited. Then read it again.

On the scale of importance, understanding how to do journal entries is right behind understanding debits and credits. If debits and credits are the words of accounting, journal entries are the sentences.

It's pretty straightforward once you get the hang of it.

"Make the adjusting entry." Everybody says it, almost nobody explains it. An adjusting entry just updates your books for something that changed, usually because time passed.

I'll show you the four types, work through prepaid rent, supplies, wages, unearned revenue, interest, and depreciation, and give you a practice set to try.

Bank reconciliations are a puzzle, and every one of them can be solved by asking a single question: who doesn't know?

I'll walk you through a full example, show you which side everything goes on, and give you a trick for finding your mistake on a test when the two sides don't match. Then you can try one yourself.

Bad Debt Expense and the Allowance for Bad Debts can be a little tricky to grasp, because there are a couple different ways to calculate it. I'll show you show an easy way to remember which method is which, and how to keep them separate.