Back to the Basics: Accounting Fundamentals Course Series 12.0 CPE

Taught by a two time former Controller and noted accounting professor at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, this course begins as review for accounting and finance professionals who need to sharpen their fundamental understanding of core accounting concepts and how they translate into the accounting and financial concepts used to run companies.

The course then dives deeper into accounting topics like transaction analysis, financial statements, the accounting equation, reconciliations, accounts receivable, depreciation, inventory accounting, and the adjusting and closing processes. Consider this an entire accounting education neatly summed up in one course.

Prerequisites

No advanced preparation or prerequisites are required for this course.

Learning Objective

• Define the accounting terms debit and credit and record business transactions into an accounting ledger represented by t-accounts using debits and credits.
• Identify how a trial balance and the accounting equation provide a framework for companies to prepare financial statements and the classification of accounts and recognize how they are impacted by debits and credits.
• Discover how to implement t-accounts and ledgers to perform transaction analysis and how to use journal entries to record transactions, recognize how to perform transaction analysis using journal entries, and identify the steps of the accounting cycle.
• Demonstrate what each financial statement does and how they are utilized by companies both large and small.
• Measure your company’s performance through the use of financial statements.
• Sharpen your understanding of how financial statements work together.
• Identify the elements of the primary accounting equation, including defining assets, liabilities and shareholders equity and recognize various transactions and their impact on the accounting equation.
• Discover how to prepare 3 of the 4 primary financial statements (income statement, statement of retained earnings, balance sheet).
• Discover Internal Controls and their objectives.
• Recognize how to prepare a bank reconciliation and prepare adjusting entries from a bank reconciliation.
• Define key terms regarding receivables and bad debts and the sequence of events related to the three primary journal entries related to accounting for bad debts.
• Recognize the impact of accounting for bad debts on the related accounts.
• Discover how to calculate values used in the Allowance Method of accounting for bad debts, how to calculate simple interest on notes receivable.
• Identify the characteristics of property, plant and equipment, how to calculate and record straight-line depreciation, units of activity depreciation, and declining balance depreciation, and how to calculate and record the sale of equipment, as well as basic concepts associated with inventory costing.
• Recognize how to perform calculations on a sequence of inventory purchases and sales under the FIFO system, the LIFO system, and the Average Cost system.
• Discover core concepts related to inventory for a merchandising business.
• Recognize how to perform transactions for the sales of inventory cycle, the purchase of inventory cycle, and other transactions associated with inventory such as sales tax and physical inventory counts.
• Discover the adjusting process and its place in the accounting cycle.
• Recognize the proper accounting treatment for prepayments made, prepayments received, expenses accrued prior to payment, and revenue earned prior to payment.
• Discover the reason to perform closing journal entries and identify how they fit in the accounting cycle.
• Recognize how to prepare the four closing journal entries
• Identify the closing entries and discover how they compare to the statement of retained earnings.

Last updated/reviewed: March 5, 2024