Understand how to maintain correct financial statements

Errors made during the double-entry process are almost inevitable in real life but having the skills to identify and correct them ensures your financial statements can remain accurate.

On this three-week course, you’ll understand the need for controls within the accounting system and how they are used to ensure accuracy and reliability with your reporting.

Going beyond the basics of double-entry bookkeeping, you’ll understand the issues that can arise within an accounting system and gain the skills to help you deal with them in real-world contexts.

Explore control accounts and reconciliations

To ensure your accounts are consistent and accurate, you’ll learn how to carry out the process of reconciliations. You’ll cover sales, purchase, and bank reconciliations and learn to produce control accounts and reconciliations of key values.

This knowledge is key in helping to increase the validity of the figures in your financial statements.

Learn how to produce a bank reconciliation

You’ll consider the difference in how a bank deals with cash transactions vs how a business does, and how the two agree.

With this knowledge, you’ll learn how to produce a bank reconciliation to help double-check your bookkeeping to produce figures you can rely on.

Understand types of errors in accounting and how to correct them

You’ll finish the course by exploring the errors within the accounting system, and how you can correct them either with or without a suspense account. You’ll also explore irrecoverable debts and how to account for them.

By the end of the course, you’ll feel confident in your knowledge of the controls within an accounting system to help ensure your figures are accurate and complete.

Syllabus

Week 1
Subsidiary ledger and control accounts
- Welcome
  Welcome to a new course and week on controls within the accounting system.
- The general ledger and subsidiary accounts
  This activity is a reminder of what makes up the general ledger, and how the general ledger can be used to exercise control over the recording of transactions.
- Sales and purchase returns
  This activity revisits returns to see how they can impact the subsidiary ledgers.
- Control accounts and reconciliations
  This activity takes us through how control accounts can help the business gain assurances with regards to the balances that appear in the financial statements.
Week 2
Errors and suspense accounts
- Welcome
  Welcome to a new week covering errors and the suspense account.
- The journal: new entries within
  This activity will look at some different types of entries which are often posted to the journal.
- Errors
  This activity explores the different types of errors which will need to be corrected at the point when the Trial Balance is drawn up.
Week 3
Bank reconciliations
- Welcome
  Welcome to a new week which covers bank reconciliations.
- Reconciling the cash book to the bank statements
  In this activity we will be looking at the cash book in more depth, and also looking at transactions which create differences when comparing the cashbook to the bank statements.

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Learning on this course

On every step of the course you can meet other learners, share your ideas and join in with active discussions in the comments.

What will you achieve?

By the end of the course, you‘ll be able to...

Evaluate the need for controls within the accounting systems and how they are used practically.
Apply accounting controls and discuss their importance in the overall process.
Investigate the bigger picture and how the various processes link together and how they can give assurances.
Identify the risk of errors arising and the need for the journal to correct these errors.
Explore the business Cashbook as well as Petty cash and see how they are maintained.
Compare the different types of errors and why we take the approach to correct them that we do.
Explore irrecoverable debts, why they arise and why we need to make an adjustment for them.

Who is the course for?

This course is designed for anyone interested in learning more about how to achieve accuracy in financial statements.

It will be most beneficial for those who have knowledge of double-entry bookkeeping and want to further their skills.

You may be currently studying at college or university or perhaps you would like a course to help you brush up on accounting knowledge gained many years ago.

Who developed the course?

Kaplan

Kaplan UK is a leading international provider of educational and career services. Building on a rich heritage of more than 50 years of training accountants and financial professionals, Kaplan UK serves more than 48,000 students a year, both based in the UK and from overseas, who train for AAT, CIMA, ACCA and ICAEW qualifications.

Established
1971
Location
London, UK

About this ExpertTrack

Gain vital bookkeeping know-how and skills to use in any business venture with this practical approach to managing finances.

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