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Book-keeping and Accounting for the Small Business: How to Keep the Books and Maintain Financial Control Over Your Business | 
 enlarge | Author: Peter Taylor
Publisher: How To Books Ltd
Category: Book
List Price: £9.99
Buy New: £4.10
You Save: £5.89 (59%)
Rating:  6 reviews
Sales Rank: 75077
Media: Paperback
Edition: 7th Revised edition
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 260
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.4 x 0.6
ISBN: 1857038789
Dewey Decimal Number: 657
EAN: 9781857038781
ASIN: 1857038789
Publication Date: June 1, 2003
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews: Read 1 more reviews...
 Not comrehensive and at times confusing August 7, 2007
I bought his book as a way to get a basic understanding of book-keeping. The first two chapters are useful if you want to set up a very simple system. Chapter three gives a good overview of VAT but doesn't give enough details about how to create a VAT return, which is not very helpful.
As your business grows, you will want to increase the sophistication of your book-keeping. Unfortunately this is a particularly weak aspect of the book. The chapter on double-entry book-keeping is very poor and I certainly couldn't follow it. You need a good understanding of debits and credits to be able to do double-entries, which if well-explained is easy. But the author doesn't explain it well and the examples confuse things further. By comparison, accountingforeveryone dot com provides a much better explanation and it may be worth buying the online book (though I haven't yet).
Not realllly what I was looking for..... March 20, 2007
7 out of 8 found this review helpful
I'm starting a small business. I figured I'd best brush up on my book-keeping skills so I went to my local Boarders and ended up buying this.
Bit of a dissapointment. Admitedly I've only read the first two chapters in depth, but that's enough for me, and it obviously was for the author, because the first two chapters (well, just the second chapter really) are the only ones that brush upon pure book-keeping. And it doesn't even do that very well. The examples are vaugely supported, but have little to no explanation as to where some of the figures come from. I actually had to get a calculator out to understand exactly what they were trying to illustrate and still came up short.
Don't be fooled by the "Revised and Updated" seal of approval either. Supposedly having been revised in 2003, it only deals with cash or cheque payments, with no consideration of electronic or debit payments. Also in the tiny section on computerised book-keeping it recommends that your computer will most likely have a Windows based operating system which is (and I quote) "a graphical interface which provides an intuitive and efficient work enviroment for your personal computer", ha! Unbelieveable! I bought the book to learn about recording cash flow, not to learn the basics of Personal Computing! It gets better.... it recommends that this intuitive operating system will most likely be Windows ME! Laughable!
But I digress. This book was updated in the sense of a few extra paragraphs to include Limited Liability Partnerships and suchlike, and the rest of the book was obviously left without tweaking.
If your parents want to understand how to balance their cheques and maybe keep financial records of the logers rent then this is the book for them. If thats not what you're looking for (which let's be honest...it's not) then steer well clear!
I'm off to Boarders tomorrow to ask the nice manager guy if he would give me a refund.
Unevenly written and out of date. January 3, 2007
6 out of 7 found this review helpful
The basic accounting principles and methods outlined in the book are still valid.
However, they are sometimes poorly illustrated. For instance, when explaining the example accounts of a company called E Foster, simplified random numbers brought in, instead of using the E Foster account figures. I found this confusing and pointless. I presume that the accounts were explained in this way because the book was written before the invention of electronic calculators. Using a calculator, the more complex numbers of the E Foster accounts are very easy to follow.
Although updated since originally written (in the 1960's?), the updated sections are very uneven. The computerised record keeping section is obviously a complete afterthought that does not stitch itself into the rest of a "paper" centric book.
This may be a positive or negative point depending on how you plan to do your accounting. If you are planning to computerise your accounts, this is most definitely not the book for you. Even if you are planning to set up simple paper accounts, you will probably be better off with another book.
A document from the dark ages January 22, 2006
61 out of 63 found this review helpful
Oh dear. There are three pages in the appendix that include "useful website addresses", "2005/6 tax rates" and "Computer bookkeeping software".
This is the almost the only evidence I could find that this book has in any way been updated in the last fifty years, although it was allegedly revised as recently as 2003.
All records are supposed to be kept in hand-written books of account, with the occasional reference to carbon copies. Spreadsheets? They don't even rate a mention.
As an accountant trying to help small businesses, I feel that HowTo Books should withdraw this completely irrelevant volume from sale, as anyone starting up a business who reads this will at best get a headache and at worst follow the instructions and waste a lot of time that should be spent in the 21st century.
Typical archaic methods of accountants January 5, 2006
36 out of 39 found this review helpful
Example: He advocates using exercise books to keep accounts. In 2006 this is unacceptable and possibly negligent advice.
Use a spreadsheet at a minimum, at least then you can create backups. The book would be fine if you wish to have the pain of record keeping and accounts by hand, or it were still the 1950s, but it isn't and there is no need to perpetuate the out-dated and laborious methods cited in this book. I'm going to look instead for a book about computerized accountancy.
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