Office Accounting II

Course Description

Office Accounting II teaches small business accounting practices using QuickBooks Pro software. Students learn to establish a business, construct a chart of accounts, handle invoices and payments, manage bills and inventory, and generate financial statements.

Within the SCNS taxonomy, APA is the Applied Accounting prefix. Daytona State publishes this at 3 credits, offered fall and spring, with APA1111 or permission of the chairperson as prerequisite.

The most valuable thing to take from a software-based accounting course is that the software does not know what you meant. QuickBooks will happily record a transaction to the wrong account, in the wrong period, in the wrong entity, and produce a beautifully formatted report from it — and the report will be believed. Fluency in the tool is what gets the first job; understanding the accounting underneath it is what stops you producing confident nonsense, and it is what distinguishes a bookkeeper who can be trusted alone with a business's records.

Daytona State does not publish a contact-hour figure for this course. It is an unsuffixed lecture course, and the institution's lecture convention is 15 contact hours per credit — TAX3001, PSY1012 and SYG2000 are all live at 3 credits and 45 hours. This course is priced at that convention.

Learning Outcomes

Required Outcomes

• Set up a new company file and configure it appropriately.
• Design a chart of accounts suited to a business.
• Describe the accounting equation and how the software applies it.
• Enter opening balances correctly.
• Set up customers, vendors, and items.
• Create and send invoices and sales receipts.
• Record customer payments and manage receivables.
• Manage aged receivables and follow up on overdue accounts.
• Enter and pay bills and manage payables.
• Record expenses and allocate them correctly.
• Manage inventory items and record purchases and sales.
• Describe inventory valuation and its effect on reported results.
• Process payroll at an introductory level.
• Describe payroll tax obligations and deposit requirements.
• Record and reconcile bank and credit card accounts.
• Investigate and resolve reconciliation differences.
• Record adjusting entries and describe why they are needed.
• Close a period and describe what closing does.
• Generate and interpret a profit and loss statement.
• Generate and interpret a balance sheet.
• Generate and interpret a statement of cash flows.
• Customise reports for a specific question.
• Back up and safeguard company data.
• Apply internal control principles within a small business.

Optional Outcomes

• Describe Florida sales and use tax handling.
• Describe job costing and class tracking.
• Describe multi-currency and multi-location handling.
• Describe integration with banking and payment systems.
• Describe the transition to a larger accounting system.
• Prepare for a QuickBooks certification.

Major Topics

Required Topics

• Company file setup
• Chart of accounts design
• The accounting equation in software
• Opening balances
• Customers, vendors, and items
• Invoicing and sales receipts
• Customer payments and receivables
• Aged receivables
• Bills and payables
• Expense recording and allocation
• Inventory management
• Inventory valuation
• Introductory payroll
• Payroll tax obligations
• Bank and credit card reconciliation
• Resolving reconciliation differences
• Adjusting entries
• Period closing
• Profit and loss statement
• Balance sheet
• Statement of cash flows
• Report customisation
• Backup and data safeguarding
• Internal control in a small business

Optional Topics

• Florida sales and use tax
• Job costing and class tracking
• Multi-currency and multi-location
• Banking and payment integration
• Migrating to a larger system
• QuickBooks certification

Resources & Tools

• The software itself, used daily — QuickBooks and spreadsheet fluency come from hours; students frequently have free or discounted access through the college.
• QuickBooks and Microsoft certification pathways — employers name these in advertisements for bookkeeping and administrative roles, and they are inexpensive.
• IRS Small Business and Self-Employed resources (irs.gov) — free; recordkeeping requirements and the publications that explain what the books must support.
• Florida Department of Revenue (floridarevenue.com) — free; Florida sales and use tax and reemployment tax are what a Florida bookkeeper actually deals with.
• AIPB and NACPB — bookkeeper certification bodies; a credential that distinguishes candidates in a field with no licence.
• Build a practice set from a real small business — with permission, or a realistic invented one, from opening balances through to financial statements.

Career Pathways

• Bookkeeping, accounting, and auditing clerks — SOC 43-3031; the direct destination.
• Accounting technician and accounts payable or receivable specialist.
• Payroll specialist — SOC 43-3051.
• Office manager and business operations support — where small-business accounting sits in practice.
• Small business and self-employment support — independent bookkeeping for several small clients is a genuine and accessible business.
• Accountants and auditors — SOC 13-2011; requires a bachelor's degree, and CPA licensure in Florida requires 150 semester hours.
• Tax preparation — seasonal and year-round; see this repository's TAX3001 and TAX3011 guides.
• ⚠ Software fluency is what gets the first job in this field, and a certification plus a portfolio of practice work outperforms a transcript alone.

Special Information

⚠ Reconcile monthly, and treat a difference as information rather than an obstacle

• Bank reconciliation is the single most important routine control in small business accounting, because it is the one place the records are checked against an independent source.
• ⚠ Never force a reconciliation. Software will let you post a balancing adjustment to make the numbers agree — and doing so conceals exactly the error or the fraud the reconciliation existed to find. Investigate the difference.
• Reconcile every month, not annually. A twelve-month backlog is far harder to resolve than twelve monthly reconciliations, and errors compound quietly.
• Common causes of a difference are timing (outstanding cheques and deposits), duplicate entries, transposed digits, and transactions recorded in the wrong period — and a difference divisible by nine is very frequently a transposition.
• Check the date range and the period. Entering a transaction into a closed or wrong period is the commonest source of reports that change after they were issued.
• ⚠ Do not delete transactions to fix mistakes. Void or reverse them, so the audit trail survives — deletions are what make later investigation impossible.
• Back up before any bulk change, and keep backups somewhere other than the machine the file lives on.
• Document unusual entries in the memo field. The person asking about it in eighteen months is frequently you.

⚠⚠ Segregation of duties — the control small businesses skip and then get defrauded

• Small business fraud is overwhelmingly committed by trusted long-serving employees, and the enabling condition is almost always the same: one person controls a transaction from start to finish.
• ⚠ The principle is that the person who authorises, the person who records, and the person who holds the asset should not be the same person. In a very small business perfect separation is impossible — which makes compensating controls essential rather than optional.
• ⚠⚠ The owner should open the bank statement. Unopened, or opened only by the bookkeeper, is how long-running frauds stay hidden — and it costs nothing to fix.
• Require dual signatures or approval above a threshold, and review the payee list periodically for vendors nobody recognises.
• Reconcile bank accounts monthly and have someone other than the preparer review it.
• ⚠ Watch for the employee who never takes leave. It is a genuine and well-documented indicator, because an absence would let someone else see the records.
• Restrict and review software permissions, and use audit trails rather than turning them off because they are inconvenient. Accounting software records who changed what and when — that record is a control.
• Do not share logins. A shared account destroys the audit trail entirely.
• ⚠ Raise concerns rather than assuming. A bookkeeper who notices something wrong and says nothing is in a difficult position later, and organisations respond far better to an early question than a late discovery.

How Florida course levels affect transfer

The first digit of an SCNS number denotes the year of offering, not transferability. Courses at the 1000 and 2000 levels transfer transparently between Florida public institutions, and 3000 to 4000 is unproblematic since both are upper division. The boundary that actually matters is 2000 to 3000, where lower-division credit generally cannot satisfy an upper-division requirement.

APA1121 is 3 credits and approximately 45 contact hours, offered fall and spring at Daytona State.

See this repository's APA1711 (Computerized Spreadsheet) guide for the companion software course.