Accounting 101

Once, while I was taking an accounting course via a community college in New York, someone told me about the field of forensic accounting which - from my understanding - is made up of folks who go in 'after the fact' and try to make sense of the books. Usually it's for litigious purposes but the way it was described to me made it sound like they were mystery solvers. In my mind I pictured a CSI team made up of a bunch of MBAs. And, truthfully, it sounded pretty interesting. That is until I dropped out of said accounting course because I realized I just don't have the type of brain that works well with numbers.

Eventually Accounting (notice the capital 'A') came back and got me in its clutches, this time at business school where I was studying for my MBA. Apparently you needed an accounting course to graduate. All I can say is that I'm thankful to my teammates who pulled me through. Despite my better judgement, I even ended up taking a second accounting course even though it wasn't required - Cost Accounting - because my husband (an accounting major and MBA in his own right, though he has a huge finance brain that more than makes up for the lack of any financial skills on my end. I'm secretly hoping any future children inherit his finance and strategy skills) basically said he'd never talk to me again if I didn't. It was actually a really interesting course and the professor was fascinating, but once again it was by the skin of my teeth and, I believe, the fact that the professor liked that I - like him - was a triathlete, that I made it through that class with any semblance of a respectable grade.

I thought when I graduated I was done with Accounting. I was a marketing major for god's sake - we don't run numbers, we let the people who are paid far more then us do that. Course then I came up with the brilliant plan to run my own business and, since I don't have millions in startup capital, I'm stuck doing my own books. Which is the long-winded way of explaining what I've spent the last two days doing. Business taxes are due on January 31st, I have a meeting with my accountant on Friday (I'm smart enough to pay someone else to take the liability of incorrectly filling out the tax forms off my plate), and I have a backlog of several months worth of accounting. Not a good combination.

If you were bored enough to troll past posts, I'm pretty sure you'll come upon one or more posts about me complaining about QuickBooks and about keeping my books up to date. I think there's even a post where I promise to be more on top of QuickBooks. And I was, for a while. Then I broke my leg and it all went to hell in a handbasket. A rather large handbasket. It was actually somewhat amusing today while doing my own version of forensic accounting as there is a very clear line between 'before I broke my leg' and 'after I broke my leg' with regards to how well my books were kept up to date. Unfortunately, 80% of my business occurded 'after' so I've been drowing in QuickBooks for two days now.


For your amusement and prove my point here's a picture of the notes I made while trying to reconcile my merchant account. That's just one month's worth...now imagine I also have to do the same for all months of credit card and bank account statements.

Fun times - let me tell you!