Duncan Williamson: Book Introducing Accounting for AS har.html

In or around 1987 I recommended to a group of students that they buy and use a text book before I'd even seen it let alone read it. The book was Cost Accounting by Colin Drury and it turned out to be a massive disappointment and mistake. I have, 17 years later, made the same mistake.

I began teaching A level Accounting earlier this year and inherited a book that was just awful as it was out of date, badly written and the students simply couldn't understand it.

Frank Wood and Alan Sangster's Business Accounting 1 book isn't as bad as some people would have us believe but it doesn't have enough topics to offer it as an A level book. I know about Wood's A level accounting book but the price isn't right: it's over £30 and for a book that uses many of the same materials as Business Accounting 1 I think that's a pricing scandal and I would hesitate to recommend it!

Back to Harrison: he's the chief examiner for the AQA Board here in the UK and with a title such as Introducing Accounting for AS I thought we'd be onto a winner. Here's what I don't like about the book:

1 the order in which the topics are presented: I'm sorry but they're just not logical. He starts with the balance sheet, as I do; but then frolics off into profits then the trading account and then the final accounts, when the logical progression from the balance sheet is the double entry system.
2 a few chapters later he leaves the bookkeeping system to talk about VAT and then comes back to it by way of the trial balance. The trial balance could easily have been incorporated into any of the bookkeeping chapters.
3 then he goes to the ledger accounts in detail ... why? Why not deal with the ledger accounts in detail within bookkeeping? After all, ledgers just fall out of bookkeeping and books of prime entry
4 the cash book is treated several chapters away from the books of prime entry when it is a book of prime entry and ledger account all rolled into one.
5 the vertical presentation of accounts is given a chapter all to itself ... chapter TWENTY! I incorporate that aspect when I deal with the trading and profit and loss accounts and the balance sheet. It doesn't need a chapter on its own and I deal with horizontal accounts at the same time.

I find the chapters very bitty: very stop start; and each page is so busy with changes of font, changes of colour, tables and diagrams as to be confusing. The amount of information that Harrison imparts is also minimalist: I don't believe that any student working on their own from scratch could cope with this material. I think chapter seven, Books of Prime Entry, is his worst.

On page 46 there is a worked example in which Harrison demonstrates the entering of some sales and purchases in the ledgers. As part of the demonstration Harrison encourages us to open two different sales accounts for one and the same business. I know at least one student who fell foul of this poor approach.

I don't find it in the least bit helpful to find that ledger accounts, journals and so on are presented without

dates
details
folio references

Meaning that Harrison presents a Purchases Day Book or Journal like this:

Andrew 460
Zara 34
Kijah 593
Peter 742
Total 1,829
* Notice, no dates, no folio references no total transfer to the general ledger and no accompanying folio reference either.
* I think that presentation is just sloppy and will give anyone but the smartest students really bad and lazy habits.

As far as syllabus coverage is concerned, it misses out one entire paper from the AQA range of AS papers, ACC2: that paper is covered only in part and only by accident.

I haven't used the latter half of the book yet but I have skimmed it and I still don't hold out much hope that it will suddenly turn excellent.

I am providing my students with masses of my own materials to overcome the serious weaknesses of this book and I think it's a shame that Hodder and Stoughton have published such a weak book as this when there is clearly a market for an outstanding book here.

Don't buy this book and it's not even worth borrowing or begging I'm afraid.