I looked into buying the accounting prep book recommended by my school, Advanced Preparation for Financial Accounting by Robert N. Anthony and Leslie Pearlman Breitner. The book is ridiculously expensive here in New Zealand, so I’m going to wait until June/July when I return to the U.S. Amazon offers the book for about $50 and you can buy a used copy for about $15.
I am very anxious to start studying and after a frustrating day trying to get library books downloaded to my ebook I thought I would try an online learning approach. A quick search for ‘free online accounting class’ and I found several promising sites.
I did the introductory lesson from Simple Studies. It was a simple summary of what accounting means and a brief overview of the financial statements, Income Statement, Statement of Changes in Equity, Balance Sheet and Cash Flow Statement. I was happy to realize that I actually remembered these things, and the review helped jog my memory. I did decently in accounting. I believe I took two classes and received B’s in both of them.
I also remember that when you actually have to write things down and do the math, which isn’t really math at all, it gets a little tricky. I don’t want to ruin my vacation my stressing over this, as I’ll have a month to do the book when I get home. I will however try to finish the online course. They do expect registration and a fee for all aspects of the course, but I think just the review will work for me.
I also found this page, which listed several colleges that have their classes on line. I quickly glanced at some of them and they required text books, so I’ll stick to the other free classes online. If you have a good source of free accounting lessons, please share them here.
Tags: accounting, MBA