Reference fixture — not teaching material
This lesson exists to exercise the platform. It was not written by a subject-matter expert and has not been reviewed by one. Do not study from it.
Why businesses keep books
By the end: Name who reads financial information and what decision each reader makes with it.
Accounting exists because people need to make decisions about a business, and memory and opinion are not good enough. Every set of books is written for a reader, and knowing which reader you are writing for tells you what matters.
The owner needs to know whether the business made money and whether it can pay next month’s bills — which are different questions, and one of the first surprises in this course is that a profitable business can run out of cash. A lender needs to know whether the business can repay a loan. A tax authority needs to know what is owed. An investor needs to know whether the business is worth buying into. A manager needs to know which jobs are worth taking and which customers are costing more than they bring in.
Throughout this course we will follow one small business: Clearview Cleaning, a company with a few staff, some equipment, and a growing list of customers. Every example uses Clearview so you are never learning a new business at the same time as a new concept.
Your job as a bookkeeper is to turn what actually happened into a record that those readers can trust. The rest of this course is the method for doing that reliably — and the method is remarkably consistent across countries, industries, and company sizes.