Accounting Concepts for Technology Professionals

📋 Overview

Ever had an accountant push back on a "simple" change and wondered why? This course is the translation guide. Taught by a CPA who also writes code, it skips the debits-and-credits drills and goes straight to the ideas behind the requirements finance hands to technology: why a fraction of a cent can matter, why a timesheet is audit evidence, why you can't just rerun last month, and what "the books are closed" really means. Participants explore materiality, the chart of accounts as the schema of the business, historical cost versus fair value, software capitalization, period close, error correction, intercompany activity, and the two oldest controls in accounting: reconciliation and segregation of duties. The session finishes where internal controls and information security turn out to be two sides of the same coin, including what changes when a bot or AI agent posts the entry. Expect real-world scenarios, quick knowledge checks, and 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

• Apply materiality and substance over form to determine how financial data should be classified, mapped, and measured, including the use of historical cost and fair value.
• Determine when technology costs, including internally developed software and cloud implementations, should be capitalized or expensed.
• Explain how period close, cutoff, error correction, and consistency govern when and how financial data can be recorded or changed.
• Describe how transactions between related legal entities are recorded and eliminated in consolidation, and identify the data needed to support them.
• Apply reconciliation, segregation of duties, and IT general controls to evaluate the reliability and security of financial systems, including automated and AI-driven 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. Materiality: quantitative and qualitative, aggregate errors, and tolerance thresholds
2. The chart of accounts as the schema of the business: accounts, dimensions, mapping, and substance over form
3. Historical cost vs. fair value: the fair value hierarchy, realized vs. unrealized gains, and conservatism
4. Capitalize vs. expense, tech edition: internal-use software, ASU 2025-06, and cloud/SaaS implementation costs
5. Period close: the close cycle, cutoff, trade vs. settlement date, and period locks
6. Changing history, changing rules: out-of-period adjustments, revisions, restatements, and consistency
7. Intercompany and consolidation: legal entities, eliminations, and why intercompany balances break
8. The two oldest controls: reconciliation and segregation of duties in technology roles
9. Controls and security: audit assertions, IT general controls, IPE, SOC 1 reports, and records retention
10. Automation and AI: bots as users, logic changes as program changes, and evidence of human review

🏷️ 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.