Intro to Small Business Accounting and Finance-Online at Independence Community College

"Few, very few, get their financial tracking system to a level where they can see snapshots of their overall business condition with the confidence that those snapshots are supported by all their financial transactions recorded accurately and reconciled in a timely manner."

If you talk to bankers and others who know, they will tell you that nearly 100% of failed businesses don't have a good financial tracking system. 

This is the class introduction for my Intro to Small Business Accounting and Finance Online Class.

Hello and Welcome to Intro to Small Business Accounting and Finance


Survival in today's competitive business environment requires good decisions made daily. Nearly all business decisions require up-to-date financial information for full effectiveness. Unfortunately, many business owners make daily business decisions based on the balance in their check book on any given day.

Some owners purchase QuickBooks or some other financial software package. Some even take a 4-hour QuickBooks class now and again. Most get to a point where they can manage to make payroll, pay their bills and know how much is owed to them. Few, very few, get their financial tracking system to a level where they can see snapshots of their overall business condition with the confidence that those snapshots are supported by all their financial transactions recorded accurately and reconciled in a timely manner.

As I've worked over the years in QuickBooks, Quicken and others and watched small business owners struggle with the challenge of having solid financial information available at their fingertips, I've come to these conclusions:

• Most people can't or won't learn enough about QuickBooks on their own to have the financial information before them to make the best decisions

• You can't learn to use QuickBooks effectively by attending one or even two 4-hour QuickBooks classes

• You can't learn to use QuickBooks effectively without an introduction to balance sheet accounting and the concept of the debit and credit

• You don't have to become an accountant or take a bunch of accounting classes to learn to use QuickBooks and to better understand your financial condition

I've worked to develop this course in an effort to make it more effective at helping the small business owner or aspiring entrepreneur develop a good financial tracking system without having to become an accountant.

An introductory scenario demonstrates a situation many small business owners face. They have been able to establish a business and generate sales, but can't really see for sure how they are doing or how to plan for the future. The Go-Venture online simulation allows students to make daily decisions in running a small business and to journalize each transaction so you can see how your transactions feed into the financial reports.

Since QuickBooks (QB) has such a large share of the market for small business accounting software, we use QB to implement the principles we learn from the scenario and the simulation. Knowledge of these principles and the functionality of QB will transfer to most of the other small business accounting software packages you may encounter.

The activities and exercises in the sixteen chapter QuickBooks learning guide will help you become very familiar with QB features and the way it can help streamline the recording of transactions and provide accurate reports and snapshot views of your business.

The course objective is:

To provide the fundamental concepts required to plan and develop a solid financial and informational recordkeeping system; a cornerstone for any successful business, including a thorough knowledge of QuickBooks and a 140 day trial period for QuickBooks software.



The online business simulation, “Go-Venture Accounting” will give students a fun, interactive introduction into small business financials while “running” a small business.



There is no penalty for late work, however if you wait until the end of the semester to catch up you very likely will not do well.

There is an instruction sheet in each lesson folder that will tell you the assignments that are due for that lesson.