This hands-on course is designed primarily for accountants, bookkeepers, accounting students, and financial professionals who want to strengthen their ability to organize data, construct automated reporting systems, and think more deeply about how accounting software and database-driven applications work. Rather than working only with another traditional set of financial transactions, we will use a structured nonfinancial dataset as the case study. This allows us to concentrate on the underlying Excel, database, and accounting-information-system concepts without simply repeating the same accounting exercises.
Throughout the course, we will repeatedly compare the system we build in Excel with familiar accounting structures found in bookkeeping systems and programs such as QuickBooks.
We will examine concepts analogous to:
- Chart of accounts and standardized master lists
- Account names and account numbers
- Account types and classifications
- Departments and classes
- Source data and data-entry forms
- Journal and general-ledger-style detail
- Trial-balance-style consolidated reporting
- Report drill-down and source-data relationships
- Permanent and temporary classifications
- Changing reporting perspectives
- Single-source database architecture
