Accounting Concepts for Technology Professionals

📋 Overview

Ever had an accountant push back on a "simple" change and wondered why? Most of finance's requirements trace back to a short list of accounting principles and to how financial data must behave once it is recorded: it belongs to one entity and one period, it is corrected rather than edited, and someone independent must be able to verify it. This course, taught by a CPA who also writes code, picks up where the debits-and-credits basics leave off. It covers the principles that rarely get explained to technology teams, the chart of accounts as the schema of the business, how periods close, why history cannot simply be rerun, when software development costs become an asset, and why internal controls and information security are two sides of the same coin. Participants who build, integrate, or support financial systems will leave able to explain the "why" behind the requirements they receive and to spot problems before finance finds them at close. Real-world scenarios show how a batch job can break cutoff, how a rounding choice can become a restatement, why a timesheet is audit evidence, and what changes when a bot or AI agent posts the entry. Each section ends with a quick knowledge check, and the course closes with a practical set of questions to bring to any project that touches financial data.

👥 Who Should Attend

IT Managers, Software Developers, Systems Analysts, ERP Consultants, and Technical Project Managers who collaborate with finance and accounting departments.

🎯 Learning Objectives

• Identify core accounting principles (economic entity, going concern, monetary unit, periodicity, materiality, consistency, conservatism, substance over form, and verifiability) and relate each to a system design requirement.
• Analyze how the chart of accounts, account segments, mapping rules, and measurement basis determine how a transaction is classified and valued, including how transactions between related entities are recorded, eliminated in consolidation, and supported by the data each side captures.
• Explain how period close, cutoff, settlement timing, and error-correction rules govern when and how financial data can be recorded or changed.
• Determine which internal-use software and cloud implementation costs are capitalized or expensed, and identify the evidence that supports them.
• Evaluate IT general controls, segregation of duties, and reconciliations between systems for automated and AI-driven financial processes.

🚀 What You'll Walk Away With

• You'll know why accountants ask for what they ask for, and how to design for it up front.
• You'll recognize when a data fix, rounding change, or late feed is really an accounting event.
• You'll understand why your development time may be sitting on the balance sheet.
• You'll map audit and control requirements to the security concepts you already use.
• You'll bring a practical checklist of questions to any project that touches financial data.

📚 Major Topics

1. The Principles and the Ledger as a Data Model
2. Time, the Close, and Changing History
3. Your Work on the Balance Sheet
4. Controls, Security, and Automation

🏷️ Topics

❓ Questions

✍️ A Note from the Author

I've spent years watching brilliant technical teams struggle to build financial tools because the underlying logic felt like a foreign language. I wrote this course for the developers and analysts who want to stop treating the general ledger as a black box. My goal is to help you understand the 'why' behind the ledger so your systems actually reflect the business reality.