Financial Accounting

Introduction

Welcome to Financial Accounting! This course is being designed to introduce the basic skills needed to build a foundation for the field of accounting. As with all Wikiversity courses, this is a continual joint collaboration among numerous sources, so please check back at regular intervals for updates and new material. Also, please feel free to use the discussion tab at the top of the page for any questions, comments, concerns, or ideas concerning this course.

Financial Accounting will be divided into sessions, each on its own page. Each session is meant to represent the material that would normally be consumed in a single classroom period.

If you are an accounting whiz, we invite you to Be bold!

Prerequisites

None. This course assumes no prior knowledge of accounting or finance.

Goals and Objectives

By the end of this course, you will be able to:

Explain what the different branches of accounting are and why they are important.
Describe and use various terminology used in the field.
Describe and identify when to use accrual vs. cash accounting.
Read and analyze a set of financial statements.
Explain double entry accounting and the "accounting equation".
Perform basic double-entry accounting entries using T-accounts.
Perform depreciation entries on fixed assets
Perform end-of-period closing entries.
Describe the accounting cycles.

Textbook and required readings

There is no textbook for this course. Required readings will be displayed in the individual sessions. They will be comprised of Wikipedia articles and URLs to other websites.

How to use this course

This course is a work in progress and will, hopefully, be updated and improved continually. Education typically consists of three components: a lecture, class discussion and problem solving. The lecture component can be accessed through the links below under the "Sessions" heading. Some of the lectures consist of links to other sites to prevent re-inventing the wheel. The class discussion component can be accessed at the top left of the screen in the link "Discuss". The problem solving component will be in each of the sessions.

Use this course on its own to brush up on your skills or as a complement to course work you've been given.

Sessions

The following sessions will correspond to the numbered objectives in this syllabus.

Session 1 What do we mean by accounting?
Session 2 Put the what in the where?
Session 3 Cash or accrual?
Session 4 What is the point of all this?
Session 5 For every entry, there is an equal and opposite entry.
Session 6 Debits and credits visualized.
Session 7 Stretching out costs.