Weeks 1–6 · inside the business
You inherit a hundred hectares of coffee from a relative you never met and run it from Canada. Carlos runs the farm. Each part of the case is a year, and you pick the year from the menu at the top right of the page.
The tabs across the top are in the order you work them. Start at the left and move right, and you will have done the year in the order it happens: read what occurred, record it, read what the record now says, hear what it leaves out, and decide something. The four tabs after the divider are not part of that order. They are there to be consulted from wherever you are.
This is one year. Six years make the universe.
What happened, and what you are holding
Opens with what the year holds: how many entries there are, in how many passes, and what comes after them. Then the year's events in plain language, with whatever the previous year decided already folded in. Read it before anything else. From Year 2 on it also tells you what the class chose last time and what that choice did.
Record it
The year's transactions, then the 31 December adjustments. Type the accounts and the amounts and check the entry. You are told what is wrong and why — wrong side, wrong amount, an account that does not belong, an entry that does not balance — and you can try again as many times as you like.
Skip and Next move you through the set, and the list above shows what is done and what was skipped. You can go back to anything at any time.
Some items need no entry at all, and saying so is the right answer — hiring somebody is not a transaction. And the answer stays shut until you have attempted the entry: a wrong attempt opens it, skipping does not.
Read it
The statements your entries produced, the measures that come off them, and the arithmetic of what moved each one. A change is traced to its causes rather than described, so you can see which part of a ratio did the moving. Sometimes the answer is that nothing about the business changed and the calendar did.
This tab is not there in Year 1, and its absence is the point. A ratio with nothing to compare it against is a number with no argument in it.
What the numbers do not carry
Carlos phones from the farm. He deals in what he can see from standing in it, which is not what the statements record, and he carries no figures at all — those are on the page, where you can look at them twice. He is also the person all of this information reaches you through, which is worth holding on to.
Rework it, then choose
What the reported figures do not settle on their own. You see what is known, you choose, and you say what decided it. Nothing is marked. Bring it to class: whatever the class settles on is what the next year opens from, and the entries you do then follow from the choice.
Use these from wherever you are. They do not belong to any one year.
Seven ideas the whole course runs on — why anyone needs accounting numbers at all, why a number is better or worse rather than true or false, what happens to a measure once somebody is paid on it, and what the system cannot see. Worth reading once early and again after a decision has gone badly.
Twenty-one shapes an entry can take, each worked through on a different company so that the numbers never collide with the finca's. This is what to open when an entry looks unfamiliar: most of them are a type you have already met wearing different clothes, and naming the pattern is most of the work.
The one part of the site that generates rather than reveals. A fresh set of entries and a fresh set of statements each time, built the same way the in-class portion is. Unlimited, and the statements are not tied to the entries, which is also true in the exam.
Searches everything at once — a bank of answers to the questions a first course actually gets asked, the help topics, the entry types, the toolkit, and the explanation attached to every entry in every year. Nothing you type leaves your browser. When it has no answer it says so rather than handing you a near miss and letting you think it answered. Then the question goes to me on Canvas.
If it has no answer, that is when to write to me — and to take your work record with you. It lists which entries you attempted, how many times, which came out right and which you skipped, and prints to a PDF you can attach, so the reply can be about the accounting rather than about what you have already tried.
One thing before you start. An entry that comes back wrong is the useful case — that is what the checking is for, and it costs you nothing. Work out what the feedback is objecting to rather than guessing again.
Continue to the finca →You can come back to this page any time from the link at the top of the case.