Learn accounting for free
I&#x27;ve never gotten the reconciliation of many of these &quot;learn accounting&quot; guides with what it takes to do actual accounting. They seem to make a big deal of covering very basic concepts that I would expect anybody with a programming background to pick up in under 10 minutes. The topics covered by these guides are less complex than most APIs.<p>But when it comes time to do actual accounting, there is a whole host of much more complicated concepts - depreciation, capitalization, tax law, tax law, tax law, etc. And these never seem to be explained in any comprehensive way that would make me think I &quot;know&quot; accounting. Rather it&#x27;s like the pedagogy is focused on basic math (which people call &quot;accounting&quot;), because you will only learn all of the details with experience.<p>I even felt this same divide when I tried out Quickbooks, which I had thought was one of the gold standards for small business accounting. I was hoping for something that would walk me through how I needed to categorize expenses, track assets for depreciation, etc. Instead I was greeted with basically a spreadsheet replacement to automate problems I didn&#x27;t have (eg printing checks at scale).<p>Am I wildly off base here, or is there something else I&#x27;m missing?<p>Taking a look at the site posted, it does seems to have many chapters with later ones covering advanced topics. But for instance taking a look at the chapter on depreciation, there are still additional details you&#x27;d actually need to do your taxes. I can understand how a simpler model helps someone learning this as their &quot;first field&quot;, and they&#x27;ll learn the richer model later. But from the perspective of someone who knows how to program, I&#x27;m still left wondering what value there is from reading general guides versus eg directly digging into what tax law forces you to calculate.