To the Student:
Whether you become an accountant, businessperson, or just someone who interacts
with businesses, you will inevitably encounter accounting. Your ability to interpret
and understand accounting will be a critical element in determining your ability to be
successful and achieve your life-long goals.
Even now, accounting is all around you. You are probably already familiar with
simple elements of accounting, such as your checkbook, credit card statement, and
bank statement. Using accounting systems, individuals and businesses are able to
measure how much money they have and how that money has changed over time. In
fact, learning about business and accounting is fascinating. Thus, we believe the study
of accounting should be fun.
With the objective of making your study of accounting exciting and fun, we have
written this text with you in mind. We have designed the text by building a solid foun-
dation of basic concepts before moving into more complex topics. Our foundation is
what we term the “Integrated Financial Statement Framework.” This framework is used
throughout the text and is designed to help you understand the world of accounting
in a new and innovative way. The framework is our strategy for linking the elements
of accounting together so that you can more easily understand how accounting works,
how it is used in business, and how it can be used to help you both in this course and
in your future business experiences.
We wish you the best of success with this course and your future endeavors.
Jon Duchac
Jim Reeve
Carl Warren