Making numbers talk
A twelve-week introduction to financial accounting, built around two businesses rather than a textbook.
Producing the accounting numbers is the smaller half of the work. The larger half is using them: reading what a set of statements says about a business, noticing what it leaves out, and reworking it until it answers the question you actually have.
Each universe is one business, followed episode by episode. You work on its numbers, you are asked what the people running it are facing, and the class decides. The decision goes into the books, and the next episode opens from what was chosen.
Weeks 1–6 · a coffee farm in Costa Rica · inside the business
You inherit a hundred hectares of coffee from a relative you never met and run it from Canada. Carlos runs the farm. You build the accounting system from nothing and find out what it can and cannot see — when a sale counts as made, what the old trees are really giving, who checks that the figures are true, and what the neighbours downhill have to say about the water in their well.
Weeks 7–12 · outside the business, looking in
No journal entries here. You are given the statements and nothing else, as an outsider is, and the work is making them useful: building the cash flow picture, asking what the reported earnings are a proxy for, and deciding what you would pay for the thing. Along the way, the communities living beside the mine have a view of their own, and it does not reach the accounts except as a cost.