This booklet is entitled MAINTAIN FINANCIAL RECORDS and addresses the fundamentals of bookkeeping.

This booklet has been written to support a manual bookkeeping course that is currently under development for this website, but is also a valuable resource for accounting and bookkeeping students alike.  The current bookkeeping and accounting cvourses offered in Australia assume that the student is familiar with and understands these principals, in reality however, the lack of this knowledge and understanding can be the difference between success or failure in becoming one of the best in the bookkeeping / accounting business.   This book is full of practical examples of how the process works.

Table of contents

Accounting Overview.. 4

General ledger (GL) Accounts. 4

Group definitions. 5

Assets. 5

Liabilities. 6

Equity. 6

Revenue. 6

Cost of Goods Sold. 6

Expenses. 6

Chart of Accounts. 7

Debits and Credits. 7

Accounting Rules. 9

GST calculations. 9

GST Rounding. 10

Journals – Specialist 11

Credit transactions. 11

Credit sales. 11

Credit purchases. 12

Cash transactions. 12

Sales Journal 13

Sales Returns Journal 13

Purchase Journal 14

Purchasers Returns Journal 14

Cash Receipts Journal 15

Cash Payments Journal 16

The Six Journal Questions. 17

Transaction Classification. 19

Account Payments with Discounts. 21

Bank Charges. 23

Dishonoured Cheques. 23

Interest 23

General Journal 23

Six General Ledger Questions. 24

General Journal Memo. 26

Managing Debtors & Creditors. 27

Control accounts. 28

Accounts Payable. 28

Trade and non-Trade Debtors / Creditors. 29

Debtor Schedules and Ageing Balances. 29

Bank Statements & Reconciliation. 31

Posting to General Ledger 34

Posting the General Journal 35

Posting the Credit Journals. 36

Posting the Cash Journals. 37

Checking for errors throughout the process. 41

Trial Balance. 41

Tracing Errors. 42

Appendix1. 43

Appendix 2. 46

Index of Figures. 48

Index of Tables. 48