Product Description

Accurate and complete bookkeeping is crucial to any business owner, but it’s also important to those who work with the business, such as investors, financial institutions, and employees. People both inside and outside the business all depend on a bookkeeper’s accurate recordings.

Bookkeeping For Dummies provides the easy and painless way to master this crucial art. You’ll be able to manage your own finances to save money and grow your business. This straightforward, no-nonsense guide shows you the basics of bookkeeping—from recording transactions to producing balance sheets and year-end reports. Discover how to:

• Outline your financial road map with a chart of accounts
• Keep journals of cash transactions
• Set up your computerized books
• Control your books, your records, and your money
• Buy and track your purchases
• Record sales returns and allowances
• Determine your employee [is “employee” necessary here?] staff’s net pay
• Maintain employee records
• Prepare your books for year’s end
• Report results and start over
• Produce an income statement
• Complete year-end payroll and reports

This guide features tips and tricks for managing your business cash with your books and also profiles important accounts for any bookkeeper. There’s no question that bookkeepers must be detail-oriented, meticulous, and accurate. Bookkeeping For Dummies shows you how to keep track of your business’s financial well-being and ensure future success!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #13457 in Books
• Published on: 2006-11-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 360 pages

From the Back Cover
The painless way to master the art of bookkeeping!

Manage your own finances to save money and grow your business!

If you're a small business owner who manages your own finances, Bookkeeping For Dummies is for you. This friendly guide covers all the basics of bookkeeping — from recording transactions to producing balance sheets and year-end reports. It's the easy way to keep track of your business's financial well-being.

Discover how to

• Keep track of transactions
• Produce balance sheets
• Create financial statements
• Manage assets and liabilities
• Keep ledgers and journals

About the Author
Lita Epstein, who earned her MBA from Emory University’s Goizueta Business School, enjoys helping people develop good financial, investing, and tax planning skills.
While getting her MBA, Lita worked as a teaching assistant for the financial accounting department and ran the accounting lab. After completing her MBA, she managed finances for a small nonprofit organization and for the facilities management section of a large medical clinic.
She designs and teaches online courses on topics such as investing for retirement, getting ready for tax time, and finance and investing for women. She’s written more than ten books, including Streetwise Retirement Planning and Trading For Dummies.
Lita was the content director for a financial services Web site, MostChoice.com, and managed the Web site Investing for Women. As a Congressional press secretary, Lita gained firsthand knowledge about how to work within and around the Federal bureaucracy, which gives her great insight into how government programs work. In the past, Lita has been a daily newspaper reporter, magazine editor, and fundraiser for the international activities of former President Jimmy Carter through The Carter Center.

Customer Reviews

Gives you the basic start you need.
So you're going to start a business, and if you have any money left over at the end of the year you're going to save part of it and spend part of it. OK, but your business partner isn't going to like that very much. 'What, you say you don't have a business partner?' Yes, you do, and he usually goes by the initials IRS.

Since you're reading this review, you obviously have, or have access to a computer. Your first thought is to go buy an accounting package. OK, that's a good idea. But those packages start throwing around funny words like 'General Ledger,' 'Accrual,' and 'Balance Sheet.'

This book starts earlier than that and starts you off with a paper based accounting system. After you know what you are doing, then it discusses three accounting packages: Simply Accounting Pro, Peachtree Accounting, and QuickBooks. Hint: A lot of banks seem to like QuickBooks and may sell it to their customers at a deep discount, or even give away at no charge.

A Request to the Author, or to anyone else reading this. There are a bunch of free accounting systems on the net. Are any of them any good? Maybe one (or more) of them could be included in the next edition of the book, or on the eTips website.

Maybe I just have a mental block --
I'm a smart girl but I STILL cannot make heads or tails out of bookkeeping. Although I now understand credits and debits, the journal entering and what not just didn't make sense. The book seemed to be too general for me. I really needed more detailed, beginner-friendly information and guidance. Maybe if you have a general idea of how bookkeeping works, this book will work for you. I, on the other hand, bought this book having absolutely no knowledge of bookkeeping, and unfortunately, I still don't.

Don't get this book
I found this book repetitive and confusing. No easy explanation was given for which accounts have a debit or credit balance (DEAD CLeRC is a helpful mnemonic), and there are as many examples of using Quickbooks as manual bookkeeping. Quickbooks is popular, but if you want to learn Quickbooks, get the Quickbook for Dummies book!

Add in silly grammatical problems and I just can't recommend this book.