Accounting For Dummies, 5th Edition

Introduction

You may know individuals who make their living as accountants. You may be thankful that they’re the accountants and you’re not. You may prefer to leave accounting to the accountants, and think that you don’t need to know anything about accounting. This attitude reminds me of the old Greyhound Bus advertising slogan “Leave the Driving to Us.” Well, if you could get around everywhere you wanted to go on the bus, that would be no problem. But if you have to drive most places, you’d better know something about cars. Throughout your life you do a lot of “financial driving,” so you should know something about accounting.

Sure, accounting involves numbers. So does watching your car mileage, knowing your blood pressure, keeping track of your bank balance, negotiating the interest rate on your home mortgage, monitoring your retirement fund, and bragging about your kid’s grade point average. You deal with numbers all the time. Accountants provide financial numbers. These numbers are very important in your financial life. Knowing nothing about financial numbers puts you at a serious disadvantage. In short, financial literacy requires a working knowledge of accounting, which this book provides.

About This Book

This book, like all For Dummies books, consists of freestanding chapters, like boats tied up to a dock. Each chapter floats on its own but the boats are all tied to the same dock. You can read the chapters in any order you please. You can tailor your reading plan to give ...