Accounting Tips For You

Bookkeeping Courses Reviewed

If you are starting a business, your uninvited biggest business partner will be the IRS or the Canada Revenue Agency. They require you to have a organized set of books and records that reflect the business income and expenses you are incurring in your operations.

Therefore, you must do some bookkeeping. But, don’t feel intimidated if you don’t know how! You have 2 or 3 alternatives.

1. Hire a bookkeeping service to do the work for you.

2. Hire a bookkeeper as an employee to do the entries.

3. Do the work yourself.

This article actually covers all three, in that, no matter which one you choose YOU MUST KNOW SOMETHING ABOUT BOOKKEEPING. This is not an article about bookkeeping software, this is not an article about using that software. This is an article about YOU taking an introductory course on HOW BOOKKEEPING WORKS. This way, no matter which method mentioned above you need for your business, you can speak with some authority and you won’t be living in a fog when it comes to the numbers.

It is impossible to run a small business without this knowledge.

And the fastest easiest way to learn it is to take an online bookkeeping course.

Because there are so many too choose from, I thought I would take away the hassle for you to decide by reviewing, in my opinion, the top five. At the end I will state my preference, which will become obvious as you read the reviews. That is just my way of trying to hook you in to read to the end. LOL

There are three types of online courses in bookkeeping to choose from:

* Courses prepared and delivered by Universities, Colleges and Training Companies

Most of these courses are directed at students that are pursuing an accounting designation, and as such, the class work load is geared towards the basic technical knowledge base. The students also tend to be a little brighter in that they had to qualify to get into the institutions academic requirements.

The continuing education departments of these places however, usually offer nighttime courses that are more geared to the small business owner.

This does not mean they don’t have excellent materials it just means generally they are targeting a different crowd than you probably are.

* Courses prepared and delivered by the software companies

These software companies will teach classes that are specific to their software and usually the classes are sit down in nature meaning you need to attend a hotel or computer training room for the class.

This is not a bad thing because if you were interested in using that piece of software you will know within the day or two whether this was a good choice for your business or not. Also, as a side note, never hurts to ask you accountant which software he recommends.

* Courses prepared and deli

vered through a website training system

Now this is where we want to concentrate because there are many private web-based training systems available.

Lastly, watch out for all the accounting and bookkeeping training academies. They are good if you want to retrain to go do bookkeeping for a living. But for our purposes they just aren’t setup to teach one introductory class.

OK LET’S GET GOING

Quickbooks Online Course

www.lynda.com – costs 25 bucks a month for access to 622 online courses and guess what, one of the courses is about quickbooks(an accounting software package) you will love me forever on this one because there are classes on just about everything software. Class is called – QuickBooks Pro 2008 Essential Training, instructor Suzanne Robertson. I have personally used this site for many of the classes and I LOVE IT. You can take the segments you want to, when you want to at a very affordable price. I am going to bet you won’t take just one class from here.

Free Bookkeeping Course

beancounters – If you like to read and not listen, this free bookkeeping course, heavy emphasis on the reading, then this site is for you. It is FREE, detailed and well organized. Oh did i mention there is some reading involved. Beancounter has a series of videos on youtube with a channel name of doofus865. They are well written BUT it’s done with this robotic voice that will drive you to leave real quick. I hope he revises them because they are good for knowledge terrible for actually listening to.

Simply Accounting

Sue du Puy – HEY, I didn’t make up the name, but she is legit, and provides an online course to use SIMPLY accounting by SAGE software. The course is expensive $400 bucks. Much more formal than I would like to see however, if you have the time, money and inclination this one is worth it. Again, depends if you want to use this software and you don’t want to travel to learn.

Community Colleges

Community College – I want you to investigate your local College or University for community education classes related to small business accounting and bookkeeping. Lots have a great classroom course that you just might get something out of. Problem is, they usually span over 10-12 weeks and you might need the info sooner.

Online bookkeeping Course

Universal Classes – Ok, it’s online, it’s modern, it will tell you what you need to know and I only found about it researching this article. And it’s only 85 bucks, some reading required and you could do the course work if you wanted. But hey it’s video. This, I think, is the epitome of an online bookkeeping course. This one really gets at the heart and soul of accounting.

I recommend this one.

Peter Gerwing is an Accountant with over 20 years of experience in the Trade. Online Bookkeeping Courses Reviewed