Brushing up on some skills

August 1, 2014

Filed under: Accounting — carlosgieseken @ 2:34 am

Accounting is one of those subjects I have a love/hate relationship with. On the one hand, I really enjoy reading about the basic concepts of accounting, since it’s so important and it is the language of business, as they say. On the other hand, I’d rather shoot myself in the thigh than have to deal with the nitty gritty of debits and credits for every stupid little transaction there is in the world.

That being said, I want to make sure that when I graduate with an MBA this December I at least have the basics of all the subjects we take down cold. In our accounting core classes we take every semester, for example, we tend to move on to the bigger stuff and it’s just assumed you have all the basics down.

But it can be hard to remember all fine details of the accounting equation if you’re not practicing frequently. So I’ve been working through The Accounting Game: Basic Accounting Fresh from the Lemonade Stand for the last couple of weeks just to freshen up a bit. (I have to thank my friend, John Sabala, who recommended the book and recently finished his e-MBA at a certain school down I-35) I wish to God I had had this book in the time leading up to IMS last year when I was trying to get a little bit of a head start before the accounting class we took then. It is heads and shoulders above Accounting for Dummies.

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The book teaches you accounting step by step, using a little kid’s lemonade stand and how it develops as a business as an example. The way the book is written and the way the information is presented, it actually makes accounting fun. I really enjoy learning about financial statements and stuff with that basic example. It doesn’t dumb things down, it just really breaks everything into small steps, which makes it easy to understand. I’m taking detailed notes in a Word document so in the future I can just refer to that instead of having to go through the whole book again.

I totally recommend this for someone who is interested in accounting, someone who might be having a little trouble in an accounting course he or she is taking, or if you’d just like to dust off some of the rust.