Are accountants educated to understand accountancy?

[patslatt]

An accountancy student casually remarked to me that it's hard to know where the debit and credit accounting entries are going when using software accounting packages. By contrast,an accountant entering books by hand in the pen and ink days had to put the entries in the correct accounts and make sure that the entries balanced at the end of the accounting period.

Isn't this taught in the classroom? I don't think so. Classroom bookkeeping and accounting exercises are very oversimplified compared to keeping the books of a business which can be extremely complicated in practice.

Is it possible to teach this level of complexity in the classroom? Possibly. Accountants in the pen and ink days used to teach apprentices starting out through "incomplete records". The records comprised a box of invoices, receipts and cashier records. The apprentice sorted them by expense category and created a full set of books and records,including financial statements and tax returns. It should be possible to recreate this accounting world in the classroom through hypothetical records of invoices,receipts and cashier records. After the student had completed full sets of books in a few cases,say retail business, increasing complexity could be introduced to cases by introducing complicated accounting ledgers in which the student would be required to make entries for incompleted periods. This would be time consuming unless the cases were carefully selected and edited to provide condensed accounting experience.

As far as I know,accountancy is not taught in this way. Which raises the question, are accountants educated to understand accountancy?

[jayblue]

someone needs to get a life and start to worry about more important things

[meriwether]

*falls asleep at most boring thread ever*

[myk]

What you are referring to is more book-keeping than accounting. In answer to your question the sort of incomplete records question was on the leaving cert sylabus when i did it 8 odd years ago. Double entry is examined in more detail now as part of the ICAI qualification with the introduction of a continuous assessment exams in this area at CAP 1 level.

[odie1kanobe]

Dear Boy

You ae talking about someone who enters items into a software package NOT an Accountant.

[patslatt]

someone needs to get a life and start to worry about more important things

Maybe if accountants understood accountancy better,the losses of hundreds of billions by international banks in the international financial bubbles could have been prevented.

[patslatt]

Dear Boy

You ae talking about someone who enters items into a software package NOT an Accountant.

He is doing his professional apprenticeship and keeping accounts of companies in an accountancy practice. Apprentices do very important professional work while their bosses are out schmoozing clients.

[cyberianpan]

An accountancy student casually remarked to me that it's hard to know where the debit and credit accounting entries are going when using software accounting packages. By contrast,an accountant entering books by hand in the pen and ink days had to put the entries in the correct accounts and make sure that the entries balanced at the end of the accounting period.

Isn't this taught in the classroom? I don't think so. Classroom bookkeeping and accounting exercises are very oversimplified compared to keeping the books of a business which can be extremely complicated in practice.
...

As far as I know,accountancy is not taught in this way. Which raises the question, are accountants educated to understand accountancy?

It is hard to know where to start. As others have mentioned you are possibly confusing accounting technicians with accountants. Also your anecdote (upon which thread is based) is unclear. For example in a complex accounting system you could enter a journal which might be automatically part apportioned to multiple cost and profit centres ... deep inside an accounting system whether a transaction is a debit or credit is arbitrary. For example we could have an internal "wash" account book ... entering credits on it might cause real world debits. I've seen accounts charts/paths which have been 7 deep (so 7 pairs of credits and debits to wash through) which can involve multiple splits ... one I examined entering a single journal would (on close) trigger journals over 14+ accounts.

Complex accounting journals will be confusing to a novice, also you appear to be conflating bookkeeping with accountancy ... accountancy includes taxation, legal/regulatory issues ...

This whole thread is based on a vague anecdote and a limited understanding of accountancy. My advice would be to delete it.

cYp
( I am not an accountant and believe there to be serious flaws in aspects of modern accounting but this is not the thread to raise serious issues)

[patslatt]

What you are referring to is more book-keeping than accounting. In answer to your question the sort of incomplete records question was on the leaving cert sylabus when i did it 8 odd years ago. Double entry is examined in more detail now as part of the ICAI qualification with the introduction of a continuous assessment exams in this area at CAP 1 level.

An experienced accounting apprentice told me that the incomplete records and accounting models used in classrooms are extremely simplistic. It should be possible to create software simulations that would capture the great complexity of the accounting systems of real companies in condensed versions of those systems. Those simulations could be designed to allow accountancy students to perform the complicated bookkeeping and accounting entries that practising accountants had to do in the pen and ink days. How can accountants learn accountancy if software packages do the entries for them?

[patslatt]

*falls asleep at most boring thread ever*

Accountancy is boring to the average person,but it can be interesting to those with very quick minds for numbers and for the complicated logic of accounting double entry systems.