Questions About Free Online Accounting Course?

Q: I have a friend who wants to start his own business some day...though he still hasn't decided what to try yet. I told him that the best first step he could take would be to learn the very basics of accounting, and that would at least give him some kind of foundation to build on. Does that sound like a good idea? If so (or maybe even if not :-) can anyone suggest places where he can learn the basics online for free? I've done a Google search, and so far it seems all I've come up with are free sites that list courses which must be paid for.

A: Sounds like an excellent suggestion. It's one of the areas most new business enterprises fail at. They end up paying through the nose to hire someone to unsnarl things and have some problems with the IRS. {grin} You probably won't find a good solution on-line. What you want is to take advantage of the public library or a store that sells used books. You'll want the oldest basic accounting book you can find. Preferrably, one that was used for high school classes thirty to forty years ago. If it mentions computers, it's too new. You want one that shows how to do business accounting on paper. Before you hire an accountant, insist on your first two months being presented on manual ledger sheets. If they can't do it well, move on to one that can. - http://www.access.wvu.edu/class/acctutor/accthome.htm http://www.wannalearn.com/Business_and_Careers/Accounting/ you can check these links out but a beginning course in general business at a local community college would be more helpful than any online accounting course . -If people haven't a clear enough understanding of the principles that they can do it on paper, then they're probably blind to the fact that they don't actually know "accounting," but rather know only what aspects of accounting Intuit programmed into QuickBooks, or such like. The Ultimate Way I have seen to unsnarl troublesome accounting problems has been to draw up the sets of transactions using T-Accounts.

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