Personal Finance #3–Financial Services & Bank Reconciliation
What you'll learn
- How to apply money management strategies
- How to apply tax management strategies
- Explain the difference between marginal tax rate and average tax rate and how to use the proper rate when planning
- Describe the difference between tax deductions and tax credits and how to use this information when doing tax planning
- List the different tax filing statuses and their impact on the tax calculation
- Explain the different tax preparation options and the pros and cons related to them
- List common financial services needed by individuals
- List financial institutions and the services they provide
- Describe what a bank reconciliation is
- Complete a personal bank reconciliation
Requirements
- None
Description
This course will focus on the importance of performing the bank reconciliation process and how to complete a bank reconciliation.
We will include many example problems, both in the format of presentations and Excel worksheet problems. The Excel worksheet presentations will include a downloadable Excel workbook with at least two tabs, one with the answer, the second with a preformatted worksheet that can be completed in a step-by-step process along with the instructional videos.
Cash management is a critical component to financial planning and taxes are a material part of cash management.
Learners will understand basic money management strategies and tax planning strategies. We will discuss the difference between a marginal tax rate and an average tax rate and how to use the appropriate tax rate when making financial plans
The course will also cover the differences between a tax deduction and a tax credit, an important distinction when doing tax planning.
Learners will know the different tax preparation options and understand which options may be best under different financial circumstances.
We will also be able to list and explain different financial services and the financial institutions that provide them, allowing us to make good decisions about which financial services to use and which financial institutions to work with.
The course will discuss the importance of reconciling the bank account, the bank reconciliation process being a big internal control over cash.
The purpose of the bank reconciliation is not just to make sure our ending cash balance is correct, but also to check that we have recorded the activity correctly.
Cash is the lifeblood of a business and of our financial activities. When thinking in terms of the double entry accounting system, cash will impact every financial cycle, meaning it will impact our revenue generation, our purchases, and our expenses, whether personal our business.
Therefore, the surer we are about the correctness of our cash transactions the surer we are about the correctness of our revenue, purchases, and expenses.
The bank reconciliation process will match our bookkeeping related to cash to the banks bookkeeping related to cash, giving us an external verification that the activity recorded is correct.
Who this course is for:
- Anybody who want to improve their personal financial planning
- Students
Instructor
- 4.4 Instructor Rating
- 51,573 Reviews
- 902,547 Students
- 150 Courses
Through working with students from many different schools, Mr. Steele has learned best practices for helping people understand accounting fast. Learning new skills and finding the best way to share knowledge with people who can benefit from it is a passion of his.
Mr. Steele has experience working as a practicing Certified Public Accountant (CPA), an accounting and business instructor, and curriculum developer. He has enjoyed putting together quality tools to improve learning and has been teaching, making instructional resources, and building curriculum since 2009. He has been a practicing CPA since 2005. Mr. Steele is a practicing CPA, has a Certified Post-Secondary Instructor (CPI) credential, a Master of Science in taxation from Golden Gate University, a Bachelor’s Degree in Business Economics with an emphasis in accounting from The University of California Santa Barbara, and a Global Management Accounting Designation (CGMA) from The American Institute of CPA (AICPA).
Mr. Steele has also authored five books that can be found on Amazon or in audiobook format on Audible. He has developed bestselling courses in accounting topics including financial accounting and QuickBooks accounting software.
In addition to working as an accountant, teaching, and developing courses Mr. Steele has helped create an accounting website at accountinginstruction, a YouTube channel called Accounting Instruction, Help, and How Too, and has developed supplemental resources including a Facebook Page, Twitter Page, and Podcasts that can be found on I-tunes, Stitcher, or Soundcloud. Mr. Steele's teaching philosophy is to make content applicable, understandable, and accessible.
Adult learners are looking for application when they learn new skills. In other words, learners want to be able to apply skills in the real world to help their lives. Mr. Steele’s formal accounting education, practical work experience, and substantial teaching experience allow him to create a curriculum that combines traditional accounting education with practical knowledge and application. He accomplishes the goals of making accounting useful and applicable by combining theory with real-world software like Excel and QuickBooks.
Many courses teach QuickBooks data entry or Excel functions but are not providing the real value learners want. Real value is a result of learning technical skills like applications, in conjunction with specific goals, like accounting goals, including being able to interpret the performance of a business.
Mr. Steele makes knowledge understandable by breaking down complex concepts into smaller units with specific objectives and using step by step learning processes to understand each unit. Many accounting textbooks cram way too much information into a course, making it impossible to understand any unit fully. By breaking the content down into digestible chunks, we can move forward much faster.
Mr. Steele also makes use of color association in both presentations and Excel worksheets, a learning tool often overlooked in the accounting field, but one that can vastly improve the speed and comprehension of learning accounting concepts.
The material is also made understandable through the application of concepts learned. Courses will typically demonstrate the accounting concepts and then provide an Excel worksheet or practice problems to work through the concepts covered. The practice problems will be accompanied by an instructional video to work through the problem in step by step format. Excel worksheets will be preformatted, usually including an answer tab that shows the completed problem, and a practice tab where learners can complete the problem along with a step by step presentation video.
Mr. Steele makes learning accounting accessible by making use of technology and partnering with teaching platforms that have a vision of spreading knowledge like Udemy.