When you check your “balance” you are looking at a type of Balance Sheet. Checking transactions and the net change for the month is like the Income Statement.

The accounting cycle is what drives accounting. In this course we’ll highlight the simple steps of the accounting cycle.

With this background you’ll be ready to perform business analysis or contribute to a financial systems development project.

But most modern systems are much more complex. This course helps lay the foundation for understanding the principles behind how financial systems work. It’s ok if you’ve never used a paper ledger, but having used a spreadsheet and having looked at a checking account or credit card statement would be helpful in understanding these principles.

The course starts with structured verses unstructured data, transactions and events verses balances, measurement concepts, posting, ledgers, attributes for creating balances called the chart of account, step-ups, and basic computer processes like joins and more.

With this background you’ll be ready to perform business analysis or contribute to a financial systems development project.

Understanding how a computer works becomes even more important when dealing with a lot of data, or “Big Data” which causes computers to perform poorly.

The course is an introductory course to the larger topic of estimating Big Data projects. It begins quite simply, but moves rapidly into the very heart of computers, and some fairly advanced topics. It concludes with some thoughts about how these topics related to Big Data projects.

With this background you’ll be ready to perform business analysis or contribute to a Big Data systems development project.

These attributes are termed the “Posting Key”. We might use the transaction attributes themselves, or we might derive the balance attributes from them by joining to other tables or doing some other form of transformation.

This is a simple form of reclassification. Reclassifications can happen for many other reasons; for example rules which post transactions to balances might change; new balances might be needed which divide amounts stored in historical balances; or report regulations might demand a balance be associated with another portion of a report.

In this course you will learn about the underlying principles of how reclassification processes can be handled in financial system.

Resources

Detailed Slides

Various slides used in the vlog are shown here, for closer inspection, including views of the intersection of risk and finance data, consolidated data supply chains, the data volume impact of transactions vs. balances upon the daily financial cycle, and others.

Report Process Estimation Spreadsheet

Balancing Act Part 4  presents a proven method for developing financial reporting applications used on some of the largest financial reporting projects in the world.  One portion of this method is report estimation processes.

The spreadsheet template, example and instructions can be used in conjunction with the Balancing Act  Chapter 30. Assess Reporting Needs,  Chapter 31. Estimate the Data Basis  and Chapter 32. Define Summary Structures  to estimate processing time and environment requirements  before  the system is built.

Reusable Video Slides

The following slides have been used in vlog videos.  They are available here for download to inspect more closely or to reuse in explaining vlog concepts.  These slides may be distributed freely.