Product Description

Accounting for Non-Accountants is the perfect accounting guide for anyone who has never taken an accounting class, and has no idea what a balance sheet, income statement, or statement of cash flow is.

Dr. Wayne Label covers it all, in a style that's easy to understand and apply. This guide will help you get your accounting system up and running and your business needs satisfied.

Topics covered include:

-- Income Statements
-- Statements of Cash Flow
-- Balance Sheets
-- Assets & Liabilities
-- Double-Entry Bookkeeping
-- Debits & Credits
-- Audits & Auditors
-- And everything else beginners need to know

For entrepreneurs or anyone who needs to brush up on accounting fast, this book is an essential resource for the businessperson's shelf.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #54364 in Books
• Published on: 2006-06-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781402206573
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

About the Author
Wayne Label has an MBA and PhD from UCLA. He has worked for the American Institute of of Certified Public Accountants, as well as various other academic posts.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The Basics of Accounting

What Is Accounting?
The purpose of accounting is to provide information that will help you make correct financial decisions. Your accountant's job is to give you the information you need to run your business as efficiently as possible while maximizing profits and keeping costs low.

QUICK Tip
Finding an Accountant: Hiring a professional and ethical accountant to aid in your business operations can be critical to the success of your company. Meet with a few accountants before making a final choice so that you know your options and can select one whose experience and work style will be best suited to your needs and the needs of your business. Local chapters of your state societies of CPAs offer referral services that can help with this.

Accounting plays a role in businesses of all sizes. Your kids' lemonade stand, a one-person business, and a multinational corporation all use the same basic accounting principles. Accounting is legislated; it affects your taxes; even the president plays a role in how accounting affects you. The list goes on and on.

Accounting is the language of business. It is the process of recording, classifying, and summarizing economic events through certain documents or financial statements. Like any other language, accounting has its own terms and rules. To understand how to interpret and use the information accounting provides, you must first understand this language. Understanding the basic concepts of accounting is essential to success in
business.

TYPES OF INFORMATION PROVIDED BY ACCOUNTANTS
• Information prepared exclusively by people within a company (managers, employees, or owners) for their own use.

• Financial information required by various government agencies such as the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).

• General information about companies provided to people outside the firm such as investors, creditors, and labor unions.

Accounting and Bookkeeping
Bookkeeping procedures and bookkeepers record and keep track of the business transactions that are later used to generate financial statements. Most bookkeeping procedures have been systematized, and, in many cases, can be handled by computer programs. Bookkeeping is a very important part of the accounting process, but it is just the beginning. There is currently no certification required to become a bookkeeper in the United States.

Accounting is the process of preparing and analyzing financial statements based on the transactions recorded through the bookkeeping process. Accountants are usually professionals who have completed at least a bachelor's degree in accounting, and often have passed a professional examination, like the Certified Public Accountant Examination, the Certified Management Accountant Examination, or the Certified Fraud Auditor Examination.

Accounting goes beyond bookkeeping and the recording of economic information to include the summarizing and reporting of this information in a way that is meant to drive decision making within a business.

Who Uses Accounting Information?
In the world of business, accounting plays an important role to aid in making critical decisions. The more complex the decision, the more detailed the information must be. Individuals and companies need different kinds of information to make their business decisions.

Let's start with you as an individual. Why would you be interested in accounting? Accounting knowledge can help you with investing in the stock market, applying for a home loan, evaluating a potential job, balancing a checkbook, and starting a personal savings plan, among other things.

Managers within a business also use accounting information daily to
make decisions, although most of these managers are not accountants.

AREAS IN WHICH MANAGERS USE ACCOUNTING INFORMATION
• Marketing (Which line of goods should the company emphasize?)

• Production (Should the company produce its goods in the United States or open a new plant in Mexico?)

• Research and Development (How much money should be set aside for new product development?)

• Sales (Should the company expand the advertising budget and take money away from some other part of the marketing budget?)

Without the proper accounting information these types of decisions would be very difficult, if not impossible, to make.

Bankers continually use accounting information. They are in the business of taking care of your money and making money with your money, so they absolutely must make good decisions. Accounting is fundamental to their decision-making process.

AREAS IN WHICH BANKERS USE ACCOUNTING INFORMATION
• Granting loans to individuals and companies
• Investing clients' money
• Setting interest rates
• Meeting federal regulations for protecting your money

Government agencies such as the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) base their regulation enforcement and compliance on the accounting information they receive.

Accountability in Accounting
A business's financial statements can also be of great interest to other members of the local or national community. Labor groups might be interested in what impact management's financial decisions have on their unions and other employees. Local communities have an interest in how a business's financial decisions (for example, layoffs or plant closings) will impact their citizens.

As the economy becomes more complex, so do the transactions within a business, and the process of reporting them to various users and making them understandable becomes more complex as well. A solid knowledge of accounting is helpful to individuals, managers, and business owners who are making their decisions based on the information accounting documents provide.

Financial Statements
Accountants supply information to people both inside and outside the firm by issuing formal reports that are called financial statements.

The financial statements are usually issued at least once a year. In many cases they are issued quarterly or more often where necessary. A set of rules, called Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, govern the preparation of the financial statements. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) has been defined as a set of objectives, conventions, and principles to govern the preparation and presentation of financial statements. These rules can be found in volumes of documents issued by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA), the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB), the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and other regulatory bodies.

The Basic Financial Statements
The basic financial statements include the Balance Sheet, the Income Statement, the Statement of Cash Flows, and the Statement of Retained Earnings. We will look at these in depth in the following chapters and see how they all interact with each other. As we discuss these financial statements, you will see they are not as scary as you might have thought they would be. Many of the concepts will already be familiar to you.

The Balance Sheet is the statement that presents the Assets of the company (those items owned by the company) and the Liabilities (those items owed to others by the company).

The Income Statement shows all of the Revenues of the company less the Expenses, to arrive at the "bottom line," the Net Income.

The Statement of Cash Flows shows how much cash we started the period with, what additions and subtractions were made during the period, and how much cash we have left over at the end of the period.

Customer Reviews

A Quick and Dirty Introduction to Accounting
In brief, Dr. Label's 10 Minute Guide... is a godsend for those of us who are 'MBA challenged'. Written in simple, easy to understand language, the book opens up the world of accounting to those who have no formal training in business. The Ten Minute Guide... serves as a useful guide and reference for those who want to keep their own books, or to better understand the finances of another business.

Dr. Label skillfully introduces the four key areas of accounting- GAAP rules, the balance sheet, the income statement, and the cash flow statement. For each area, he painstakingly defines the components that go into each area and the relationships between the individual components in an area as well as the relationships between different areas. He broadens his explanation of each area by introducing simple to follow examples of their use throughout the text. Although most of the book's emphasis is on the accounting required by sole proprietorships or partnerships, Dr. Label does extend the concepts to the stock corporation, and devotes two chapters to the analysis of a corporation's financial statements.

In addition, Dr. Label takes the reader through audits and auditors, the basics of keeping a general journal, the use of various financial statements for short and long term analysis, and the use of budgeting in business. Finally, one chapter covers some basic information on the internet and accounting (a subject that is a book unto itself), and Dr. Label thoughtfully provides a comprehensive and understandable glossary of key terms for quick reference.

Although the book is small, it is packed with a lot of useful information which is presented in a clear and succinct manner. It serves as an excellent springboard into the world of accounting, and provides a firm basis for understanding financial data and making good judgements based on such data. After reading this book, one can safely and confidently converse with an accountant and walk away with one's wallet full of cash still in one's pocket. Imagine that!

Not for beginners
This book was maddening. I'd find myself re-reading a paragraph over and over, 5 or 6 times, attempting to translate its meaning. Sentences like "The Income Statement reports this activity on the accrual basis and the Statements of Cash Flows reports it on the cash basis" lie throughout the book. Terms like 'accrual basis' and 'dividends' are suddenly announced, without any prior explanation. I bet the author is a great CPA, and extraordinarily smart. But there is no way this book was tested the way it should've been: by handing it to an otherwise savvy business person with no accounting experience, and WATCHING them read the book to see if it made any sense, and where they got hung up. If you're a real beginner, this won't be an easy answer to your questions.

Very valuable
I have been involved in a small family business for twenty years. My background is engineering. When I was at the university I never felt a need to study or understand business let alone accounting. During the last 10 years in my families business I have continued to take over more and more of the management of the company. As I have done this I have had to understand more and more about accounting in order to deal with my bankers, my financial advisors and my CPA. For years I have been struggling with this topic. A friend of mine gave me a copy of The 10-Minute Guide to Accounting for Non-accountants, and it was like a new world had opened up for me. The book was written in a manner that was so easy to use and understand in my daily life, that by the time I finished reading it (and I couldn't put it down-an accounting book?), I felt so much more confident in dealing with my financial people. Good job! I have now bought the book for ten of my friends.