Assesment 1: Accounting tools and practices

Resources

Understanding how transactions are recorded is vital to your understanding of financial statements, which in turn is important for interpreting financial statements to make sound business decisions. The following resources provide a basic understanding of how transactions are recorded and ultimately become part of the financial statements:

· Marshall, D., McManus, W., & Viele, D. (2020). Accounting: What the numbers mean (12th ed.). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill. Available in the courseroom via the VitalSource Bookshelf link.

. The following chapters cover basic accounting concepts:

. Chapter 1, "Accounting – Present and Past."

. Chapter 2, "Financial Statements and Accounting."

. Chapter 4, "Bookkeeping Process and Transactions."

· Droms, W. G., & Wright, J. O. (2015).  Finance and accounting for nonfinancial managers: All the basics you need to know.  New York, NY: Basic Books.

· The following chapter is most relevant for this assessment:

. Chapter 1, "Contemporary Financial Management," pages 15–20.

· The Accounting Cycle  |  Transcript .

· This short video explains and depicts the accounting cycle.

· Jones, D. J. (2012).  Visualizing accounting transaction flows into financial statements.  American Journal of Business Education, 5(6), 753–757.

For the assessments in this course, you may need to locate financial information for a business. Financial information for publicly traded corporations is available on the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) website.

To access financial statements for publicly traded companies, do the following:

1. Go to the  SEC website.

2. On the main page:

. Roll over the FILINGS link at the top of the page.

. Select Company Filings Search from the drop-down list.

· In the blank field, type the name of the company whose financial statements you wish to view, and then click SEARCH.

· The next page may provide a list of companies matching your search. Select the company for which you are searching.

· On the Results page, you will see a listing of filings by that company. From the list, select the financial statements you wish to view. (Hint: The filings labelled 10K are annual filings and are likely to be the most complete. The Interactive Data link allows you to select specific financial statements.)