Accounting Fundamentals: Revenue, Costs, and Profit

Your bookkeeper says you made a profit. Your bank balance says otherwise. Both can be right — and not knowing why is what keeps smart, capable people locked out of their own numbers. This course hands you the actual machinery, not a vocabulary list. You start with the one equation everything rests on — what a business owns equals what it owes plus what's left for the owners — and learn debits and credits as what they really are: left and right, not good and bad. From there you record the transactions a real business throws at you: a sale on credit, a supplier's bill, payroll, a year of insurance paid up front, a delivery van bought and slowly used up. You write each one as a balanced entry, post it, and prove it. Then comes the idea that separates bookkeeping from guessing: accrual accounting. You'll recognize revenue when it's *earned* (the five-step model professionals use), match costs to the sales they produced, and make the month-end adjustments — deferrals, accruals, depreciation, inventory, bad debts — that turn a pile of receipts into honest statements. You'll build all four financial statements and see exactly how revenue minus the cost of goods becomes gross profit, then operating profit, then the bottom line. Running through every lesson is one habit most courses skip: reading the number for what it actually says. Profit isn't cash. A balanced trial balance isn't a correct one. Book value isn't market value. By the end you can record an ordinary business event from scratch, explain where its profit came from, and tell when a number deserves your trust. No prior accounting and no math past arithmetic required — just the willingness to stop nodding along to your own financials.