Bookkeeping: An Essential Guide to Bookkeeping for Beginners along with Basic Accounting Principles

Book Preface

Bookkeepers are the lifeblood of almost every business. If you believe that information is critical, you will agree that a bookkeeper has a crucial role in a company. The information recorded in books allows business owners to make essential decisions involving market strategy or product launches while handling several other financial aspects of their business simultaneously. If it weren’t for the ongoing efforts of bookkeepers, most businesses wouldn’t know much of what was happening to their finances. With no precise financial knowledge, business executives would be merely guessing about the number of sales made, the cash drawings and withdrawals, or the cash that was paid out and the items sold to consumers during the year. It would be challenging to ascertain the amount paid out to employees or the amount spent on other business essentials.

Reliable and precise financial bookkeeping is essential to every business and is crucial to those who work within the company. Managers, owners, employees, and external teams like investors, lenders, and government agencies all rely heavily on the bookkeeper to record financial transactions accurately.

If you’re an employee whose job is to keep the books for a small business owner, or you are a business owner who does the books yourself, your role is vital, and knowing the essentials of bookkeeping is paramount. Bookkeepers must be thorough, enjoy working with numbers, and be conscientious about inserting the numbers precisely into the records. But here is another side of the coin: if you are new to bookkeeping, it might be challenging to navigate through these procedures. Well, here is the good news: this book walks you through all you need to know about bookkeeping.

What This Book Can Do for You
Bookkeeping is a continual process that starts with financial transactions. In this guide, we will cover:
Documenting those transactions in journals
Adding those transactions to a General Ledger
Checking your books to ensure they are balanced
Making appropriate changes or corrections where necessary
Structuring financial reports to show how well the business is doing

Who This Book is For
If you picked up this book to get explicit knowledge of bookkeeping, I assume you are either:
● A business owner who would love to learn how to do your books. Most likely, you may have good knowledge of the market and its jargon, but you little understanding of bookkeeping and accounting,
● Someone who has already studied bookkeeping but is looking for a comprehensive ‘refresher’ or reference work,
● A staff member in a small business who has just been asked to take over a business’s bookkeeping duties, and need to understand precisely how transactions are reported in the books, how to make sure that the entries are done correctly and accurately, and how to report financial information by using the data collected,
● Someone who does bookkeeping or intends to do bookkeeping for small businesses and wants to learn more about how to set up and keep books.
I assume you have a little knowledge of business terminology, but you don’t know much about accounting or bookkeeping. Or, perhaps, finally,
● Someone going through a job/role transition where bookkeeping and accounting are vital skills.

This book serves as a quick starter guide. Hence, if you are entirely new to the world of bookkeeping, this book is for you. So, what are you waiting for?
How about we kick-start your bookkeeping journey!

SECTION ONE: Bookkeeping Basics
Not sure of what bookkeeping is all about? In this part, discover…
Why bookkeeping is an important business feature.
How bookkeeping differs from accounting.
Manual and computerized bookkeeping basics, and
Some common bookkeeping software that can help you kick-start your bookkeeping journey