Principles of Accounting Volume 1 Financial Accounting

Reviewed by Andrew Hartzler, Professor of Accounting, Goshen College on 7/15/19

This book is perhaps the most comprehensive text I have seen for financial accounting. For those who are familiar with Financial Accounting, the index and glossary are sufficiently detailed. The fact that the text is so comprehensive is both a... read more

Reviewed by Andrew Hartzler, Professor of Accounting, Goshen College on 7/15/19

Comprehensiveness     rating: 5    see less

This book is perhaps the most comprehensive text I have seen for financial accounting. For those who are familiar with Financial Accounting, the index and glossary are sufficiently detailed. The fact that the text is so comprehensive is both a positive and a negative. It is positive in the sense that it has essentially every topic that you may want to cover in an introductory course. For newer instructors however it may be a bit daunting to distill the content down to what is most essential to cover in an introductory course. The text has some content that is more relevant to courses such as Accounting Information Systems, Financial Management, and Intermediate Accounting. An experienced instructor can recognize this and use the necessary elements for a principles course whereas for a new instructor the content is too extensive to cover in a single semester long course and would potentially overwhelm them. If an instructor's principles course contained only students who quickly and easily understood accounting concepts, then it would be possible to touch on such a wide variety of concepts in an introductory course. However, most principles courses contain business majors and other non-accounting majors who would struggle with the pace required to cover so much material.

Accuracy     rating: 5

I noticed a few typo-graphical errors but overall the text is well-written and accurate. I noticed no specific bias in the writing or examples.

Relevance/Longevity     rating: 5

Basic accounting concepts have not changed for a long time. For that reason, open source texts such as this one should be more widely used. The small incremental changes made in the basic structure of accounting do not warrant the frequent new editions that publishers try to push through. The only elements that would need to be updated may be the dates after a period of time so that they are more current and perhaps a few of the examples. The basic accounting elements however will not become obsolete and will remain relevant for the foreseeable future.

Clarity     rating: 4

This text is very well-written. It contains excellent explanations of concepts such as the differences/similarities between revenue and gains. The primary issue I see with the text (as with other financial accounting texts) is how quickly it assumes students understand concepts of revenues/expenses, the function of accounts, and cash vs. accrual accounting. For those very familiar with accounting, the ordering of the concepts in financial accounting textbooks seems to make sense. However, if one takes a step back and thinks about what students might be struggling with, one can quickly see how fast these texts expect students to make leaps in their understanding. An example of this (which is common to most financial accounting texts) is the introduction of financial statements in chapter two before students fully grasp what the elements reflected on the financial statements represent. It is critical to spend enough time with students making sure that they understand how the basic accounting system works (revenues, expenses, accounts, cash and accrual basis) before they can make full use of the subsequent accounting concepts that are presented.

Consistency     rating: 5

The structure of the book is consistent throughout.

Modularity     rating: 5

The text is sufficiently modular in format to be easily reorganized and realigned.

Organization/Structure/Flow     rating: 4

The topics follow a clear, logical order. The only exceptions are chapters 1 and 2. Chapter 1 presents a broad overview of accounting which is common in financial accounting texts. What is included is fairly logical, but I find that topics such as retail businesses vs. service businesses and the difference between lenders/creditors/stockholders are more meaningfully included later in the text when the instructor is dealing directly with the accounting elements that illustrate the differences between these topics. As I mentioned previously, chapter 2 makes the assumption that students already grasp at this early stage what revenues and expenses are and the differences between cash and accrual accounting.

Interface     rating: 5

The interface is clean and easy to follow.

Grammatical Errors     rating: 5

I noticed a few typo-graphical errors but overall the text is well-written grammatically.

Cultural Relevance     rating: 5

I did not notice any cultural insensitivity. I noted a variety of inclusive examples.

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