The Mousedriver Chronicles: The True- Life Adventures of Two First-Time Entrepreneurs by John Lusk & Kyle Harrison

Author:John Lusk & Kyle Harrison [Lusk, John & Harrison, Kyle]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Business & Economics, General
ISBN: 9780786730605
Google: ixddSfLe_CQC
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2009-04-29T00:13:26.614522+00:00

THE ART OF LOW FINANCE

At the end of 1999, while most people prepared for the dawn of the new millennium, our crack team of accountants (Kyle and I) met with two high-ranking Platinum Concepts, Inc. officials (John Lusk and Kyle Harrison) to conduct a thorough financial review of our first few months in business, for the purpose of providing an accurate financial picture for the company’s major shareholders (us).

That’s the longest way I know of to say “we did our books,” which itself is slang for figuring out how much money we spent and how much money we earned in 1999.

That’s the problem with accounting. It’s clogged to the gills with jargon and incomprehensible language. It’s also a confusing, boring mess that only an accounting professor, financial analyst, or CFO could love. Or an accountant, I suppose. Between local and federal reporting requirements (completely different for private and public companies, of course) and approximately eight billion state, local, and federal tax implications for every line item on an income statement, doing the books for a company is about as much fun as filling out tax forms for an entire neighborhood.

Of course, none of that mattered to Kyle and me. We were eager to do the books on our own company’s first fiscal year, even though Platinum Concepts, Inc. had only been in existence for seven months. There were several reasons why Kyle and I didn’t want to wait for a full calendar year to pass before we did a financial review.

First, accounting gets a bad rap. If you take tax implications out of the equation (which we did) and your inventory expenses are easy to understand (which ours were), then business accounting becomes an exercise in applying mostly sensible and straightforward rules.

Second, we may have been bored to death working through accounting case studies in business school, but the idea of running through our own numbers was a different story. It felt like we were grading ourselves, which was a lot more interesting than evaluating other people’s businesses.

Third, we hated companies whose fiscal years ran March to March or June to June, all because of arcane reasons having to do with taxes, public relations, purchasing seasons in different industries, and the deep need to drive analysts and investors completely mad. So we resolved to have our fiscal year coincide with the calendar year. Besides, we wanted to get through the whole process our first time, just so we could tell everybody we knew that yeah, we’d already completed our first fiscal year. When you own your own business, it’s amazing what amuses you.

In accounting terms, the heart and soul of our venture to date was the income statement, a simple add-and-subtract scorecard of all our sales and expenses across the past seven months (or fiscal 1999, to be technical about it). It featured all sorts of subcategories, running from the technical (Amortization Expense and Product Development) to the inescapably dull (Health Insurance and Postage). Some of our categories were intended

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.