Organizations are increasingly embracing agile to best meet their business needs and successfully manage projects. Agile Scrum: Your Quick Start Guide with Step-by-Step Instructions provides those interested or involved in innovation, project management, product development, software development or technology management with an authoritative roadmap to easily and quickly implement Scrum, the most popular agile project development and delivery framework. It helps teams deliver products in short cycles with rapid adaptation to change, fast time-to-market, and continuous improvement—which drives competitive advantage.
This book is an important and timely research study that explores a little known area of investing, which is that of private mortgage lending. The reason for undertaking the study was twofold; reason one is because for the past 15 years, retirement portfolios have been devastated by stock market fluctuations, resulting from a greater prevalence of boom and bust economic cycles. It is quite possible that currently another bust cycle might be unfolding, in spite of the apparent bull market. The second reason is because of the adopted Federal Reserve policy of creating an artificially low rate environment in an attempt to sustain the continued growth of the stock market and support of the current real estate recovery efforts.
These two economic conditions primarily affect income investors because of the low yields that are being offered by the typically available fixed-income investments, such as bonds, CDs and money-market accounts. The combination of a reduced interest rate environment and the increase stock market volatility has dramatically impacted the livelihood of the fixed income investor. Moreover, it has forced these investors to take greater levels of investment risk by incentivizing them to seek higher yields by investing in the stock market; in essence, the place that has created most of their financial problems.
Volume 1 of Basic Accounting Concepts, Principles, and Procedures ensures that the reader develops a solid comprehension of the two most important concepts necessary to learn accounting:
The fundamental structure of an economic entity
Event analysis within the context of this structure.
The book provides discussion, illustration, and practice in these two key areas that far exceed any other introductory accounting book. The great benefits of this approach are that the reader develops the ability to easily and confidently analyze new or unfamiliar events without using debits or credits. Following this, the reader then learns the essential framework of accounting concepts.
After this foundation has been established, the reader is slowly introduced to the basic debit and credit recording system, which feels simple and intuitive because of the previous practice.
Volume 1 concludes with an extended introduction and discussion of the corporate concept, corporate formation, corporate transactions, and corporate financial statements.
Although it is not necessary for the reader to cover corporate concepts to continue to Volume 2, inclusion of corporate content in Volume 1 makes this book an ideal single text for the student or manager who only wants to acquire an understanding of essential accounting concepts and relate them to the corporate entity. This avoids the detailed accounting principles and procedures presented in Volume 2, which apply to completing the accounting cycle, recording major asset types, internal control, recording payroll transactions, and performing financial statement and ratio analysis.
Volume 2, like volume 1, is a complete self-study text that provides problems, self-tests, solutions, and unlimited accounting paper for all problems and practice sets in the book. Volume 2 emphasizes the completion of the accounting cycle and the application of GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) to key accounts. The completion of the accounting cycle is presented for both service and merchandising companies. The reader here has the ability to select among full treatments of frequently used different merchandising procedures (periodic, perpetual, and different worksheet methods), an option not usually available in most introductory accounting books.
Following completion of merchandising operations, the focus shifts to principles and procedures as they apply to key account types (cash, receivables, merchandise inventory, fixed assets, and current liabilities) and the internal control procedures relating to each. Payroll procedures and payroll recording keeping are included.
The book concludes its introduction to basic accounting with a discussion of financial statement analysis using trends and financial ratios, including a forthright discussion of GAAP strengths and weaknesses. The content also includes methods of financial reporting fraud and important financial warning signs.
