Mastering Financial Accounting

In the years that I have spent both as an accountancy student and as a lecturer to accountancy students, I have consulted a good many accountancy textbooks. Unfortunately, no single textbook has ever met my specific requirement, which is to summarise concisely the subject of financial accounting within a reasonable space.My opportunity to remedy this situation has now arrived! The technique that I have adopted as far as possible is to summarise the objective of each technique covered, set out the special accounts required and the purpose of each, summarise the double entry of normal transactions involved, and provide a worked example to bring the whole together. In order to make the information most easily assimilated, I have used charts to set out the purpose of special accounts and summarise the double entry. The text takes into account the Companies Act 1985, and at the time of writing SSAP 23 is the most recent Accounting Standard. I have deliberately excluded those areas that I consider to be advanced financial accounting such as merger accounting, inflation and current cost accounting, deferred tax, and the details of earnings per share. At the other extreme, the text commences with a consideration of book-keeping techniques so far as the examination student is concerned; it is not intended to be a full treatise on the subject of book-keeping in practice. I trust that the final work will prove invaluable to examination students at all levels, as well as enlightening to those to whom accountancy is a mystery! Finally, I wish to acknowledge the assistance of my former colleagues Steve Lumby, in getting the project off the ground, and Peter Bruff, in teaching me the greater part of what I know; also to thank Ellen and Sophia for their secretarial abilities.