Accounting Fundamentals II

While it is true that accounting professionals are scarce, those with corporate accounting experience are even more rare. This course will build on the knowledge you gained in Charlene Messier's online Accounting Fundamentals course (or another introductory accounting course) to provide you with a solid understanding of corporate accounting practices. 

In Accounting Fundamentals II, you'll explore such topics as special journals, uncollectible accounts receivable, plant assets, depreciation, notes and interest, accrued revenue and expenses, dividends, retained earnings, and various financial reports for corporations. 

If you're interested in increasing your financial awareness and accountability while also gaining a marketable skill, this is the course for you.

Aims

Accounts Payable
In this lesson, you'll learn all about accounts payable, which is a group of accounts that shows how much your business owes its vendors. You'll be journalizing and posting your company's purchases and preparing a Schedule of Accounts Payable. Keeping track of what your company owes others is a vital part of operating a business. This lesson will give you the tools you'll need to successfully track those accounts.

Accounts Receivable
We'll take a close look at accounts receivable in this lesson. This is the money that your customers owe your business. After completing this lesson, you'll know how to enter charge sales into your Sales Journal and then post them to your General Ledger. Knowing what your customers owe you can make the difference between your company's success or failure.

Uncollectible Accounts Receivable
Today, we'll be dealing with uncollectible accounts receivable. While we'd all like to think that our customers will pay what they owe, it's not always the case. You'll learn how to account for long overdue receivables that probably won't ever be paid. While this doesn't happen often, it's a fact of business, so you'll need to know how to account for it in your company's books.

Plant Assets and Depreciation
In this lesson, we'll look at plant assets and depreciation. Most all businesses have assets they use to determine their income. Just like your car, business assets depreciate over time, so you'll need to know how to account for that expense in your records. And you'll need to record these assets and calculate their depreciation in a timely manner to keep accurate records for your business.

Notes Payable and Notes Receivable
This lesson is all about notes payable and notes receivable. A business might need a little extra time to pay a bill beyond the usual terms offered by the vendor. Or a customer may need an extension of credit beyond what your business usually offers its charge customers. You'll find out all you need to know about accounting for these situations as we look at how to record the issuance and payment of these notes payables and notes receivables.

Accrued Income and Accrued Expenses
Today, you'll learn how to deal with accrued income and accrued expenses. Accrued income is money that the company earns in one fiscal period that it doesn't receive until after another fiscal period begins. Similarly, accrued expenses are expenses that are incurred during one fiscal period that aren't paid until the next period. To get a true picture of the net income or net loss of your business, you'll need to account for the accrued income and accrued expenses within the period they're incurred.

Dividends and Starting the Year-End Worksheet
In this lesson, we'll be dealing with dividends, which is money paid to the company's stockholders on their investment. You'll learn how the business accounts for the dividends it pays to its stockholders. We'll also look at retained earnings, or the amount of profit the corporation retains for future use. Then we'll begin to prepare the worksheet, possibly the most important financial report a business compiles each year.

Complete Year-End Worksheet with Adjustments
Today, we'll determine if our business has a net income or a net loss by completing the worksheet we started in the previous lesson. And because many General Ledger accounts change throughout the fiscal period—supplies are used, insurance premiums are depleted—we'll need to bring these accounts up to date to reflect their current values. So we'll also take a close look at how to make adjusting entries to update our General Ledger accounts for the beginning of the new fiscal period.

End-of-Fiscal-Period Financial Reports
It's time to begin wrapping up our books for the end of the fiscal period. In this lesson, you'll learn how to compile most of the various financial reports a corporation needs to complete at the end of the fiscal period. You'll prepare an Income Statement, Stockholders' Equity Statement, Balance Sheet, and more. These are the reports that really demonstrate the success of a business.

Adjusting and Closing Entries and Post Closing Trial Balance
In this lesson, we'll get the books all caught up and ready for the next fiscal period. You'll go back and journalize those adjusting entries you entered into your worksheet, then you'll enter closing entries into your journal. Finally, you'll post these journal entries to the General Ledger to prepare it for the new fiscal period.

Preparing a Payroll
Today, we'll cover every employee's favourite subject: Payroll! You'll learn about various mandatory and voluntary deductions from employees' pay, as well as how to journalize and post an entire payroll. As an added bonus, after this lesson, you'll be able to check the accuracy of your own pay-check.

Preparing Federal Tax Deposits and Year-End Tax Reports
We'll finish up by preparing a variety of end-of-year tax reports. Here's your chance to go step-by-step through a multitude of IRS forms with instructions that are much easier to understand! You'll fill out the federal Form 941, then learn how to make federal income tax deposits. Then we'll look closely at Form W-2s and Form W-3s. Finally, we'll look at how to calculate and report the company's Federal Unemployment Tax payment. This lesson is jam packed with valuable tax information!