Customer Reviews

Excellent book - By: PhilosopherKing, 16 Nov 2008
A lady who workedin our office as a general clerk doing basic duties such as computer inputting & filing decided that she would like to go further & she bought this book. Although she had left school with only a few 'O' levels many years ago she made good progress with a little bit of help from one of my colleagues. After a while she was able to do reconciliations & so on & won promotion & a better salary. She then enrolled at evening classes & is now part way through an AAT course.

This book gives a good solid introduction to double entry book-keeping & covers all the usual ground including bank reconcilations & control accounts. It extends beyond book-keeping into basic accounting as it explains the basics of P & L a/cs & balance sheets too.

Many clerks nowadays are simply trained to do a job entering transactions onto computer packages such as Sage. Since the computer does the trial balance many clerks never learn the principles of double entry book-keeping. This is no longer necessary to learn if one is happy being a data input clerk all one's life but double entry is still needed to understand how accountancy works. When I qualified as an accountant more than 25 years ago there were many middle aged book-keepers who had learned by experience. Sometimes job advertisements might ask for someone who was a part qualified or else a QBE. The phrase QBE i.e. qualified by experience was used to refer to a person who typically had say 5 to 10 years experience as a book-keeper & could go well beyond the trial balance stage. Since the books were kept on a manual basisin those days we could train an office junior from scratch & teach them on the job. With computerised accounts this is more difficult as they don't get the experience of adding up day books & cash books & posting them to the nominal ledger each month & posting the sales day book to the sales ledger each day (and the purchase day book to the puchase ledger) as they go along. Before one took out the trial balance years ago one had to reconcile all the bank accounts, control accounts & payroll accounts & the time spent looking for differencesin e.g. the sales ledger control account involved logical reasoning & helped one to build up one's basic skills.

Nowadays, with computerised accounts everywhere a good book like this is more essential then everin order to bridge the gap between someone who can enter an invoice onto Sage, for example, & someone who is ready to be trained to prepare a set of final accounts.

This book is highly recommended.