Understanding Company Accounts 1-4

This mini course taught by a journalist-friendly forensic accountant will show you how to understand company accounts and get beyond the corporate PR spin. The emphasis will be on teaching practical skills rather than a series of lectures. The objective of the course is to ensure that all participants feel comfortable with a set of accounts and know where and how to look for relevant information.

The only prerequisites for this course are numeracy and an interest in financial matters as the theory will be taught in the first class and applied to real-life examples in the following sessions.

Participants are actively encouraged to ask questions throughout.

Part 1: Motivation to commit corporate fraud – Why are businesses motivated to commit accounting fraud and how do they do it.

Part 2: The Profit and Loss account (also known as the Income Statement) – what a business makes and spends.

Part 3: The Balance Sheet – What a business owns and what it owes. Source and Application of funds.

Part 4: The fine print – the devil’s in the detail. Probably the most important and practically useful session BUT assumes knowledge from sessions 1-3.

Participants are actively encouraged to ask questions throughout.

To benefit fully you should try and attend all sessions – and browse through the book that accompanies these sessions: The Investigative Journalist’s Guide to Company Accounts.

See also Companies House as a Tool for Investigative Journalism by Diogo Augusto.