This first lesson in the Critical Accounting course introduces you to the three main financial statements, the income statement, the balance sheet, and the cash flow statement. Learn how Apple used its 2015 financial statements to draw attention away from its biggest problem: it had too much cash!

Accrual accounting is about organizing transactions into the right time periods so that the financial picture comes into focus. This lesson covers the basics of accrual accounting. And by basic, I mean really basic.

Bookkeeping is the most basic of accounting topics. It’s often called the language of accounting, so to help you learn to think critically about accounting, we take this notion seriously. We look at bookkeeping from a linguistic perspective.

In this lesson, we take a closer look at the accounting cycle. This will help you understand the overall flow of accounting information during a fiscal period, as well as the routine accounting activities that are performed at the end of the period.

Income recognition means figuring out when you’ve actually earned your revenue, and then matching to that revenue all the expenses that went into earning it.

Whenever a company makes a sale, all kinds of things that can go wrong. What if a customer returns the goods? What if there is a warranty claim? This lesson explains how companies make allowances for these possibilities.

Earnings management is when CEOs and CFOs put their fingers on the scale, changing their company’s financial results slightly. In this lesson, you’ll learn how and why they do this, so that you can watch out for it in the income statements you read.

Accountability is supposedly the point of accounting. In this lesson, you’ll get an introduction to accountability theory, explore complex situations of accountability, and learn a tool to help you analyze corporate accountability failures.

The statement of cash flows is often misunderstood. This lesson will teach you to read and interpret the cash flow statement, to understand where the organization is in its life cycle and what its priorities are.

Accounts receivable is the money owed to a company by its customers. The main accounting problem is that at least some of the customers, for one reason or another, will not pay their bills. How should a company take this problem of bad debts into account?

Inventory includes all the items that a company has bought or built that it has for sale. If you want to do a good job of matching the cost of sales to the same period as the one where sales are recognized, you need to think beyond the cost of basic materials.

Long-term assets are those things that a company invests in, such as factories or trucks or a license to use someone else’s intellectual property, that over the coming years will help the company generate income. The accounting issues are around what value should be shown for an asset on the balance sheet, and how the investment in that asset should be expensed to match the revenue generated by the asset.

Current liabilities are the financial obligations of a company that will be settled within the coming fiscal year. This time element changes how we account for liabilities. So does the power of the claimant: liabilities have a political dimension.

Long-term liabilities are the financial obligations that a company does not expect to settle within the coming fiscal year. This time factor makes a huge difference in how to account for these liabilities.

The equity section of the balance sheet has all kinds of curious line items in it. In this lesson, we go over all of them, and learn how things like dividends and stock options affect the equity section.

Investments in other companies are complicated to account for, because the investing company’s influence over the investee affects the investor’s returns from its investment. That’s the problem accounting has to wrestle with.

Financial statement analysis is a hugely important topic. This lesson helps you understand not just how to do the relevant calculations, but how to interpret them to generate meaningful insights.

Hendrik Vollmer shares some profound thoughts on how people use numbers to accomplish their goals. This lesson teaches you to get the most out of your ratio calculations and financial statement analyses.