Celebrating the 4th with Governmental Accounting
Happy 4th of July! I’m getting close to the end of my first run-through of FAR topics. I’ve been celebrating the USA’s independence by studying how our government approaches accounting!
Governmental accounting was not covered in my undergraduate classes, but apparently it’s an important part of my CPA exam preparation because Roger (Roger’s CPA Exam Review) says that it’s a big part of the exam! Go figure! I wonder why they don’t teach it to us in school, because now I have to learn it all for the first time during my CPA exam “review.”
So far, most of the topics for FAR really have been a “review.” I was familiar with the concepts, even if I didn’t quite remember how to account for them. Governmental accounting is all sorts of new craziness. It feels like learning debits and credits all over again, back when it didn’t make any sense.
Accounts seem to have dopplganger accounts–they have almost the same name, but one will have “estimated” in front of it, and the other won’t. Sometimes you’re using accrual accounting, and sometimes you’re using this funky “modified accrual” which I had heard of before, but never seen.
My approach to this section has been to watch the Roger CPA Review course associated with this section first (3.5 hours of video review–probably the longest single topic so far.) Next, I’m re-reading the Roger CPA Review book that goes along with the video lectures, to see if it makes more sense a second time through. Tomorrow, I’ll start on the problems, and I’m hoping it starts to really make sense then… although I’m feeling slightly more comfortable with it since I re-read the chapter.
After that, non-profits and consolidations I think, and then I’ll be DONE, DONE I TELL YOU. Oh wait, except for doing a million practice tests and looking at simulations and going back and studying the stuff I forgot since I started studying…
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A course in government/NFPO accounting is required by the Mississippi State Board of Public Accountancy to be eligible to sit for the CPA exam in MS.