John A. Tracy - Accounting For Canadians For Dummies

Accounting For Canadians For Dummies

Published by: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030-5774, www.wiley.com

Copyright 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey

Published simultaneously in Canada

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2019937196

ISBN 978-1-119-57583-2 (pbk); ISBN 978-1-119-57586-3 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-119-57581-8 (ebk)

1. Chapter 1
2. Chapter 2
3. Chapter 3
4. Chapter 4
5. Chapter 5
6. Chapter 6
7. Chapter 7
8. Chapter 9
9. Chapter 10
10. Chapter 11
11. Chapter 12
12. Chapter 13
13. Chapter 14

You may know individuals who make their living as accountants. You may be thankful that theyre the accountants and youre not. You may prefer to leave accounting to the accountants, and think that you dont need to know anything about accounting. This attitude evokes the old Greyhound Bus advertising slogan Leave the Driving to Us. Well, if you could get around everywhere you wanted to go on the bus, that would be okay. But if you have to drive most places, youd better know something about cars. You do a lot of financial driving, so you should know something about accounting as well.

Sure, accounting involves numbers. So does watching your car mileage, knowing your vital health statistics, keeping track of your bank balance, negotiating the interest rate on your home mortgage, monitoring your retirement fund, and bragging about your kids grade point average. You deal with numbers all the time. Accountants provide financial numbers. These numbers are important in your financial life. Knowing nothing about financial numbers puts you at a serious disadvantage. In short, financial literacy requires a working knowledge of accounting, which this book provides.

Here are some advantages this book offers over other accounting texts:

• We explain accounting in plain English with a minimum of jargon and technical details. (We also provide a glossary of accounting terms in the back of the book.)
• We carefully follow a step-by-step approach in explaining topics.
• We include only topics that non-accountants should understand; we avoid topics that only practising accountants have to know.
• We provide frank discussions of certain sensitive topics that go unmentioned in many accounting books.
• Weve set up the book so you can read the chapters in any order you please. You can tailor your reading plan to give priority to the chapters of most interest to you and read other chapters as time permits.

We want to emphasize that this book is not an accounting textbook. Introductory accounting textbooks are ponderous, dry as dust, and overly detailed. However, textbooks have one advantage: They include exercises and problems. If you have the time, you can gain additional insights and test your understanding of accounting by working the exercises in Accounting Workbook For Dummies (Wiley).

Although we assume that you have a basic familiarity with the business world, we take nothing for granted regarding how much accounting you know. Even if you have some experience with accounting and financial statements, we think youll find this book useful because it should provide insights you havent thought of before.

We've written this book with a wide audience in mind. You should find yourself more than once in the following list of potential readers:

• Business managers (at all levels): Trying to manage a business without a good grip on financial statements can lead to disaster. How can you manage your businesss financial performance if you dont even understand the financial statements?
• Business buyers and sellers: Anyone thinking of buying or selling a business should know how to read its financial statements and how to true up the accounting reports that serve as the basis for setting a market value on the business.
• Entrepreneurs: As budding business managers, entrepreneurs need a solid grasp of accounting basics.
• Active investors: Investors in marketable securities, real estate, and other ventures need to know how to read financial statements both to stay informed about their investments and to spot any signs of trouble.