To the surprise of many, Personal Accounting is typically more complex than Small Business Accounting.

You have more decisions to make than those in Small Business and you have more options with regards to the naming of accounts. Worse yet, you have to decide what is a required expense and what is optional. For me, it's impossible to think that morning coffee is a required expense, but if I told you that should be categorized as optional most of you might really freak out!?

Who knew, right?

Furthermore, in personal accounting, few want or truly need to use a Balance Sheet with Personal Accounting .

If you decide not to use one, as most will conclude, it may be important for some of you to learn about other cross checking systems we have built in to help with data integrity should any of your reporting seem a bit off.

So, for purposes of an introductory course, you are going to pretend you are a Small Business Person because that's an easier place to start. After that we will introduce you to some material that tells you how to take your Small Business Bookkeeping knowledge and apply it for personal use.

So, to get going...

Please proceed to the For Small Business > Intro & Pre-Reading page and see if this is for you!

We are going to try to split up the introductory classes such that people with current and active small businesses are in one class and those faking it for purposes of a preliminary education for personal use are in another, although we may find that isn't necessary.