A few weeks ago, my professor assigned us a scenario from our workbook and instructed us to complete a worksheet with it. In the worksheet, we are to provide all of the account titles, an unadjusted trial balance, adjustments, an adjusted trial balance, the income statement, and a balance sheet. At the beginning of this semester, I would have looked at this assignment and notified my parents of my immediate withdrawal from the university. However, I took this project on with great confidence for a few reasons:
1. Accounting is easy.
Yeah. I said it. The stereotype of this career being easy is absolutely true. Literally, all it's about is remembering a few little tips and tricks about manipulation of transactions, grabbing a calculator (or abacus if you prefer), and crunching away at some numbers until you can produce a valid number of statements regarding the business for which you account. In fact, all you really need to do is play around with Microsoft Excel until you've produced a professional looking report with some numbers and lines, and maybe even colors.
I completed this assignment, due at the end of the semester, in a matter of roughly 30 minutes. I spent more time making style adjustments than I did actually computing and organizing data. What's magic about Excel is that it does the work for you.
2. Accounting is fun...relatively speaking.
Who doesn't love playing with numbers. As lame as it sounds, accounting is just a matter of making sure everything matches up (or at least makes sense). This is really cool, especially in that this concept is vital in the coherency and accuracy of a worksheet. For example the debits and credits on the unadjusted and adjusted trial balances had to equal; the difference between total debits and credits on the income statement gives you the net income or loss; and the difference between debits and credits on the balance sheet also gives you net income or loss. [The contrast between balance sheet and income statement net income or loss is that the balance sheet is a reflection of that business' current financial standing as an aggregative report of previous periods' retained earnings and other permanent accounts (see previous posts) while the income statement is more often referred to as the observed result from a period's revenues and expenses.]
So yes, accounts are just professional number crunchers, but I think that's totally cool. Numbers don't make sense to everyone, so if you can get the rules and regulations of accounting down, you can easily earn your CPA and PEOPLE WILL GIVE YOU MONEY to, if relative, have fun playing with numbers!
3. I have confidence in what I have learned about accounting thus far.
I have recently been able to say with complete honesty that I have learned more from this class and my economics class than I did in my four years of high school combined. I'm not just saying this as a typical teen who said "screw high school"; I have legitimately learned so much and feel like the world of business is the place for me and my career. In fact, I have become so eager and excited to take on my own business, that I have neglected to focus on my other, far less important classes such as biology and French culture (in both of which I have an A...no worries) and have immersed myself as fully as I can in everything business.
That being said, this passion that I have developed has made learning very easy. I wouldn't say it's very fun reading my accounting textbook, but I always feel so satisfied when I can put what I've learned into practice and build upon it over time. And because everything builds on everything else, I am pretty much always confident in what I am doing.
So, I'm not telling my group that I've already done the project because I don't want them just taking the answers. But I'll be a good sport and help them out.
The next time I write, we will have a new president. If you read this before November 8, let's vote to make America great again, for the sake of the business world if nothing else.
FYI....49 days till Christmas.
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