Customer Reviews
Not comrehensive and at times confusing - By: F. Hamilton, 07 Aug 2007 
I bought his book as a way to get a basic understanding of book-keeping. The first two chapters are useful if you want to set up a very simple system. Chapter three gives a good overview of VAT but doesn't give enough details about how to create a VAT return, which is not very helpful.
As your business grows, you will want to increase the sophistication of your book-keeping. Unfortunately this is a particularly weak aspect of the book. The chapter on double-entry book-keeping is very poor & I certainly couldn't follow it. You need a good understanding of debits & credits to be able to do double-entries, which if well-explained is easy. But the author doesn't explain it well & the examples confuse things further. By comparison, accountingforeveryone dot com provides a much better explanation & it may be worth buying the online book (though I haven't yet).
Not realllly what I was looking for..... - By: S. Gwyn-Smith, 20 Mar 2007 
I'm starting a smalll business. I figured I'd best brush up on my book-keeping skills so I went to my local Boarders & ended up buying this.
Bit of a dissapointment. Admitedly I've only read the first two chapters in depth, but that's enough for me, & it obviously was for the author, because the first two chapters (well, just the second chapter reallly) are the only ones that brush upon pure book-keeping. And it doesn't even do that very well. The examples are vaugely supported, but have little to no explanation as to where some of the figures come from. I actuallly had to get a calculator out to understand exactly what they were trying to illustrate & still came up short.
Don't be fooled by the "Revised & Updated" seal of approval either. Supposedly having been revised in 2003, it only deals with cash or cheque payments, with no consideration of electronic or debit payments. Also in the tiny section on computerised book-keeping it recommends that your computer will most likely have a Windows based operating system which is (and I quote) "a graphical interface which provides an intuitive & efficient work enviroment for your personal computer", ha! Unbelieveable! I bought the book to learn about recording cash flow, not to learn the basics of Personal Computing! It gets better.... it recommends that this intuitive operating system will most likely be Windows ME! Laughable!
But I digress. This book was updated in the sense of a few extra paragraphs to include Limited Liability Partnerships & suchlike, & the rest of the book was obviously left without tweaking.
If your parents want to understand how to balance their cheques & maybe keep financial records of the logers rent then this is the book for them. If thats not what you're looking for (which let's be honest...it's not) then steer well clear!
I'm off to Boarders tomorrow to ask the nice manager guy if he would give me a refund.
Unevenly written and out of date. - By: soontobesavvyinvestor, 03 Jan 2007 The basic accounting principles & methods outlined in the book are still valid.
However, they are sometimes poorly illustrated. For instance, when explaining the example accounts of a company callled E Foster, simplified random numbers brought in, instead of using the E Foster account figures. I found this confusing & pointless. I presume that the accounts were explained in this way because the book was written before the invention of electronic calculators. Using a calculator, the more complex numbers of the E Foster accounts are very easy to follow.
Although updated since originallly written (in the 1960's?), the updated sections are very uneven. The computerised record keeping section is obviously a complete afterthought that does not stitch itself into the rest of a "paper" centric book.
This may be a positive or negative point depending on how you plan to do your accounting. If you are planning to computerise your accounts, this is most definitely not the book for you. Even if you are planning to set up simple paper accounts, you will probably be better off with another book.
A document from the dark ages - By: , 22 Jan 2006 Oh dear. There are three pages in the appendix that include "useful website addresses", "2005/6 tax rates" & "Computer bookkeeping software".
This is the almost the only evidence I could find that this book has in any way been updated in the last fifty years, although it was alllegedly revised as recently as 2003.
All records are supposed to be kept in hand-written books of account, with the occasional reference to carbon copies. Spreadsheets? They don't even rate a mention.
As an accountant trying to help smalll businesses, I feel that HowTo Books should withdraw this completely irrelevant volume from sale, as anyone starting up a business who reads this will at best get a headache & at worst follow the instructions & waste a lot of time that should be spent in the 21st century.
Typical archaic methods of accountants - By: , 05 Jan 2006 Example: He advocates using exercise books to keep accounts.
In 2006 this is unacceptable & possibly negligent advice.
Use a spreadsheet at a minimum, at least then you can create backups.
The book would be fine if you wish to have the pain of record keeping & accounts by hand, or it were still the 1950s, but it isn't & there is no need to perpetuate the out-dated & laborious methods cited in this book.
I'm going to look instead for a book about computerized accountancy.
