Accounting is the language of business. If you are learning accounting for the first time, embracing its foundational concepts may be a challenging process. Mastery of accounting primarily rests in your ability to critically think through and synthesize the information as it applies to a given situation. You should approach the learning of accounting the same way you would approach learning a foreign language; it will take time and practice to ensure you remember the concepts.
There are a number of sub-disciplines that fall under the umbrella of accounting, but this course will focus on financial accounting. Accounting as a business discipline can be viewed as a system of compiled data. Data should not be confused with information. In accounting, data is the raw transactions or business activity that happens within any business entity. For example, if someone uses $30,000 of their savings to start a business, that is a point of data. Now that you have this data, what are you going to do with it? Of course, the answer is accounting!

Taking data and transforming it into useful information is what happens when a business uses accounting. Information is the communicated results data as it has happened in a business within a period of time. This information is used by decision-makers determine specific courses of action for the business.

This course will introduce you to financial accounting in preparation for more advanced business topics. Recording financial information in a standard format allows managers, investors, lenders, stakeholders, and regulators to make appropriate decisions. In this course, we will look at the Income Statement, Balance Sheet, Statement of Cash Flows, and Statement of Shareholders’ Equity. You will learn how to compile and analyze these financial statements, determine the value of a firm, and compare the firm to its competitors.