By : Joseph O’Brien
Lots of people who enjoy writing are not nearly as comfortable with numbers as they are with words. But try as we might, nobody can avoid maths – particularly when it comes to money. And if you’ve got ambitions for your business, taking a sensible approach to the financial side of things will be vital.
As you can imagine, there’s a vast amount of online courses for learning the basics of accounting. But before you even get to that stage, you might want to just get a feel for the key terms and basic ideas.
Accounting Coach
Harold Averkamp is an experienced accountant, and a little over 10 years ago, he established Accounting Coach. 
You can tell that Averkamp not only knows accounting, but he knows how to teach it too – the site is generously populated with games and quizzes, and the whole design is wonderfully clean and straightforward. This site is the perfect mix of clarity and fun. It is not patronising at all and has the atmosphere of a professional teaching environment – even if you don’t sign up and purchase the proper course material.
My Accounting Course
Just like Accounting Coach, My Accounting Course has been written with care, and is not just a dump of confusing information. It also has quizzes, so you can test your developing knowledge, but the standout resource here is the selection of examples. Being able to see what a sales journal entry actually looks like (for example) makes all the difference. A great resource once you have familiarised yourself with the most important terms and ideas.
Slide Share
You might want to take a different approach and explore Slide Share. As you can imagine, accounting is one of those topics which people have tried to present in simple, yet attractive, slide presentations. And of course, some are able to be more knowledgeable than others. But once you start recognising and understanding the key accounting terms, it can be a useful exercise to scroll through a few of these, and see what sticks.
Cartoons!
What’s the real test of your familiarity with accounting? Whether or not you understand jokes about accounting! Humour is for insiders; thus, if you start to understand some ‘industry jokes’, it probably means you’re getting your head round some accounting basics. Randy Glasbergen is one of America’s top cartoonists and his website has plenty of hilarious stuff about number-crunchers. If you raise a smile, it might just mean you’re learning the ropes!
Small Business blog
If you have looked around online for approachable and readable accounting blogs, you may have noticed a lot of American content – and it’s hard to know which bits are relevant to UK readers. So the Small Business blog is a reassuring presence which has lots of useful links, guides and interesting opinion pieces. This is one to visit once you’ve grasped the basics (it assumes you will be a bit interested in accounting topics to begin with), but it’s still a refreshingly breezy read.
This article was written by Joseph O’Brien. Joseph writes about helpful accounting materials for all levels for BookCheck.