UniSA Online - Online Experience

The content of this course has been designed with the assumption that you have no previous accounting experience. This course aims to give you an appreciation of the fundamental concepts of accounting, an understanding of some of the basic accounting processes and how these may be useful in a business setting.

As the topics unfold in this course you will find that in many ways accounting involves the application of specific assumptions and techniques to a variety of situations. As important as these assumptions and procedures are, they make no sense if the social context of their use is not understood. If you have previously studied accounting at secondary school, TAFE or a similar institution and level, the prevalence of 'Why?' in this course in addition to the 'How?' that may have guided your previous study will take a little getting used to. However, the 'Why?' is central to the nature of any course at tertiary level - even accounting!

This reading will introduce you to the broader context of accounting and its role. As you can see, there are several learning outcomes associated with this reading. Please don’t be daunted by this, primarily what you need to focus on is the nature of accounting and its main functions, the potential users of accounting information and the decision making process.

In these readings, we introduce the different types of organisations that operate in business, their structure and how they are managed. We describe also some of the basic financial statements prepared by the accountant, the assumptions made in preparing these statements and the effects of transactions on the preparation of financial statements.

This reading examines the basic procedures used in a manual accounting system to analyse, record and summarise the effects of transactions on an entity in order to generate information for use in decision making. The recording and summarising functions are mainly performed by computers but the data gathered and stored in a computerised system is based on an analysis similar to the manual one developed in this task. To effectively use financial reports for decision making, it is essential that we understand the underlying accounting system and this is most easily done by studying the procedures used in a manually operated system.

This reading provides a brief overview of the current regulatory arrangements in Australia for the development of accounting standards. Such standards are variously influenced by many interested parties, including the government, professional accounting bodies, representatives of those who prepare financial statements for publication (such as the Institute of Directors, the Group of 100) and international accounting standard setting bodies.