About Navigating Accounting

The content on this web site is comprised of elements of Navigating Accounting®, a multimedia educational product developed and authored by G. Peter and Carolyn R. Wilson, co-founders of NavAcc, LLC.

This website is a free portal for accounting educational content for global educators and learners, including corporate and self-learners. The content is available under Creative Commons Licenses. See the terms of use link at the bottom of the page for more information. Currently, this is a prototype site. In return for your use of this site, we would appreciate any feedback, ideas for improvements, or notification of errors. Please contact us.

Why did we create Navigating Accounting?

We suspect most authors choose to write accounting texts and create multimedia content because they conclude – rightly or wrongly – that available materials fail to meet students’ needs. This perception of a gap between needs and offerings encouraged us to start developing Navigating Accounting content and using it with our students nearly twenty years ago. It motivates us even more today because that gap has widened considerably over time.

In fact, a 2007 conference hosted by the FASB and American Accounting Association underscored practitioners’ concerns about this gap. During a panel discussion on accounting education, several prominent participants – including representatives from the FASB, IASB, SEC, and Microsoft – harshly criticized the state of accounting education. Their central argument was accounting education has not kept pace with the dramatic changes in business practices and financial reporting during the past twenty years. The practitioners concluded that most of us are still teaching the same entries and concepts taught in the 1970s.

As educators, we share the challenge of dealing with complexities without overwhelming our students. Indeed, an integral aspect of the art of teaching is to reduce complexity as much as possible using robust principles, concepts, processes, and illustrations that faithfully reflect reality.

Simplifying accounting is not difficult; the challenge is simplifying it without distorting reality. This is Navigating Accounting’s goal.

Why is Navigating Accounting free?

As educators, we all give a great deal of our time to others and generally receive more in return in the form of student appreciation and satisfaction from making the world a better place. By making Navigating Accounting free, this is one more way we want to give to others.

An additional source of our motivation is that during your careers, as educators or managers, you will collectively make decisions that affect the flow of billions of dollars worth of resources around the globe and the lives of countless individuals. Our humble hope is the quality of your decisions can be improved, in part, by what you learn from this web site.

 

Also see: Citations, Attributions, Privacy, and Terms of Use

 

 

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