Learn

From the first pound to the trial balance, then the records every business keeps: day books, the bank, VAT and control accounts.

From a quotation to a paid invoice: the documents, the discounts, the day books and the customer and supplier accounts behind every sale and purchase.

How money moves in and out of a business: payment methods, the cash book, petty cash, bank statements and the controls that keep it safe.

Put the books right: journals, the errors a trial balance hides, the suspense account, control account reconciliations and payroll in the ledgers.

VAT from the first invoice to the finished return: rates, invoices, tax points, the VAT account, the boxes of the return and the special schemes.

Understand your own payslip first. Then work out gross pay, deductions and net pay for a whole team, and what the employer owes HMRC.

What a product really costs: classifying and coding costs, valuing inventory, labour, overheads, break-even and budgets.

The entries that turn a year of bookkeeping into accounts: accruals, prepayments, depreciation, disposals, doubtful debts, inventory and the extended trial balance.

From a trial balance to a finished set of accounts for a sole trader, a partnership and a small company, and the principles behind them.

For owners and managers: what a set of accounts is telling you about profit, cash and how hard the money in the business is working.

For sole traders doing their own records: what to keep, how to invoice, what counts as an expense, and the figures a tax return asks for.

The formulas an office job really uses, in Excel or Google Sheets: sums, percentages, IF, lookups, dates and pivot tables.

The sums that come up at work, one method at a time: percentages, VAT, discounts, mark-up and margin, rounding, averages, ratios and interest.