6 Milestones on the Road to College

6 Milestones on the Road to CollegeFinding out the best & getting into the preferred college is one of the biggest challenges for parents and their children after the high school education. It’s not an easy task for everyone to achieve desired goal without any skill and knowledge. Thus, it is very important to preparing during high school education both academically and financially to deal successfully with college days challenges. To reduce some stress & overcome upcoming difficulties, you can arrange a meeting with counselor and discuss all the important courses to take throughout high school, summer tutoring opportunities as well as extracurricular activities. Indeed, students can register for & take SAT subject test, PSAT/ACT and Reasoning test.

Parents can assist their child create well-versed decisions about his/her education, learn about colleges, perform well academically and discover the best possible opportunities for the college education. Usually, people need to pay attention to each critical step as well as plan ahead along their route to college.

Have a look at the 5 important milestones along your way to college that can help you reach at your preferred destination!

Ready to Face Challenges & Become a Skilled College Candidate During high school education in 9th, 10th, 11th and 12th Grade, students get the better opportunity to learn about the different subjects & prepare for college. Meet with career counselor or guidance counselor in the early hours to lay out a plan to get the toughest & challenging academic courses viable for you. Thus, with the aim to become a strong college candidate, take challenging classes of different subjects like Mathematics, Physics, English, Economics, Science, Arts, History, Civics, Chemistry, Geography and a Foreign Language. In this way, you can improve your basics in all important courses and get the top grades during high school education.

Make a Plan & Start Saving for College Education Financing for college is one of the significant & critical situations for parents. Thus, it is advantageous to build up a financial plan as soon as possible by determining an affordable college education cost to pay per year. Along with this, you also need to consider how much total debt is reasonable to carry once your child will graduate, and who will refund it. Also, determine all additional cost and find out the sources like student education loan, students & parent loans, need-based aid as well as scholarships. In order to reach at the final decision, you can arrange a meeting with a financial planner or tax professional. A financial expert can assist you in all ways to determine what you can afford to spend on college education of your child without sacrificing your future. Moreover, you can also explore different ways to save money like investing in mutual funds, open a saving account in a bank, etc.

Register for and Take the Standardized Test

Participating in standardized testing is one of the very efficient ways to show your skill set, knowledge as well as strength. For this, you must register early on and take the PSAT/NMSQT (Preliminary Scholastic Assessment Test/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test), ACT (American College Test), SAT Subject Tests, SAT (Scholastic Assessment Test), or any other competitive exams required for admission in your preferred list of the best colleges. If you are not able to pay registration fee, you can contact your counselor with reference to getting a fee waiver.

Attend Summer Opportunity Fairs, Seminars, Interviews & Schedule College Visits

If you want to learn about types of colleges and their opportunities, qualities as well as differences, then it is better to visit career fairs, attend seminars, face interviews and pursue community-based extracurricular activities or summer opportunities according to your knowledge & skill set. Indeed, you can also attend college meetings held by representatives & experts. After comparing all the essential qualities, facts & financial figures, you can easily narrow down the college list & choose the best one as per your preferences and affordability. After selecting your college, prepare & fill your application form or admission form carefully with complete information & required documents. Moreover, follow the given instructions & pay close attention to applicable deadlines in order to form submission.

Investigate the Availability of Financial Aid & Apply for Scholarships

One of the most important milestones along your way to college is conduct an inquiry about the availability of financial aid from state, private, federal, and local sources for college students. For more information & in-depth inquiries, you can meet or contact your guidance counselor. To gather more info, go to the library & try to find directories of scholarships for disabled students, women as well as minorities. You can also apply for scholarships. There are many organizations inside and outside the colleges offer scholarships such as professional associations, corporations, credit unions, religious organizations, and labor unions.

Make a Final List to Apply for College:

Start applying to the colleges that you have sorted on your final list. You can begin the application process by writing application essay, which tend to help colleges get to know you. Pick an essay writing on the topic you are familiar with and confident of writing it down. Complete and then apply to those colleges where you are competitive.

Start getting higher grades from your first day of college. Signed up for an online college tutoring programs today.

9 Things You Need To Know About Financial Statements

Financial StatementEvery business owners, company investors and board of directors would like to see how their company performing financially. A need for preparing financial statements becomes a routine part for any organization. These financial statements tell business owners, companies board of directors a true picture about the health of their organization. Therefore, interpreting and understanding these financial statements becomes important on the part of investors, owners and companies board of directors.

What is Financial Statements?

Financial statements are formal record of the financial activities and position of a business, person, or any organization or a legal entity. The financial activities are presented in a structured manner which is easy to read and understand by any individual. The key financial information’s are recorded either on:

  • Income Statement
  • Balance Sheet
  • Statement of Cash Flow

In this article, I will explain you what the financial statements have to offer and how to use them to work in your favor.

  1. Business Investor and Financial Analyst all use Balance Sheet, Income statement and Statement of cash flow before making any financial decision. These statements truly reflect the financial health of any organization. The other statements such as statement of owner equity, retained earnings are important too but not critical. Investors can refer them also to make their financial decision.
  2. The financial statements are widely used to develop a score card to help business owner to compare the score card with actual and make any decision if there is any variance between the score card and actual results. Financial Analyst prepares this score card based on the historical financial information presented by the company in the form of Financial Statements.
  3. The financial statements are widely used by financial analyst to calculate various financial ratios which tend to show an indicator of company present performance and where company is heading in the future. These financial ratios are often presented to board of directors or investors for review.
  4. An active investor likes to see these statements before investing in to company. The auditor of company uses these financial statements to prepare his audit report. The audit report can either be unaudited which is based on mid-year financial statement and final auditor report which is normally completed after the company financial reporting period ends.
  5. If the company owns several other subsidiaries companies, the financial statements can also be prepared as consolidated financial statement where it includes financial information of both parent company and all its subsidiaries companies.
  6. GAAP (generally accepted accounting principles) rules followed by majority of large companies which allow the company to prepare their financial statements according to GAAP. There are basically two conventions, one of historical cost and other one accrual accounting, according to GAAP, the assets are valued at their historical cost whereas revenues and expenses are recoded when they are incurred. Therefore, the investor should really need to understand the statement of cash flow of any organization to see health of the company performance.
  7. Income statement is another statement that cannot be overlooked by any investor. Income statement normally reveals the ability of a business of how much business generates a profit. On the other hand, it does not reflect how much of assets and liabilities business required to generate a profit.
  8. Investor or financial analyst can perform a variance analysis if they have the financial information’s to see some powerful indicator such as profitability trend, sales trend and revenue trend. These variance analyses help the investors to make their financial decisions.
  9. Cash flow statement is the most important financial statement for any business mainly because it focuses solely on changes in cash inflows and outflows over a period of time. This report presents investors a more clear view of a company’s cash flows than the income statement, which can sometimes present skewed results, especially when accruals are required to be maintained according to GAAP

Conclusion:

An overview of the above financial statement helps the readers to see a bigger picture of the company. However, the beginning investor should also prepare to learn more about investment qualities before they invest in the companies.

Still confused about financial statement? Connect with online accounting tutor to understand more about financial statements and improve learning before investing.

Guide To Understanding And Setting Up The Chart Of Accounts For Any Business

Chart of accountsChart of accounts are those accounts which are commonly used by medium or large corporation to classify its income statement, balance sheet items in a structured way by department, expenses, incomes, assets and liabilities of an organization.

It is also a powerful tool for any organization to manage its expenses, revenue, assets and liabilities in order to understand the overall financial health of the organization. Normally all the charts of account run using accounting software which aggregate the entity financial information. The information can be sorted by department for any time frame.

Each account in the chart of accounts is typically assigned a unique number by which it can be identified. The unique number generally starts from numerical number from 1-5 where:

1 Represent Current Assets

2 Represent Current Liabilities

3 Represent Operating Incomes

4 Represent Cost of Goods Sold

5 Represent Operating Expenses

How to set up the chart of accounts?

Business owners can set up their business chart of accounts as shown below. As you can see in the table below, each account is assigned a unique number which is 5 digits long. It is the industry standard however, the business can shorten or make longer number as they wishes.

Assets Side of Balance Sheet (account numbers start with 1)

Current Assets

10100 Cash – Regular Checking

10200 Cash – Payroll Checking

10600 Petty Cash in hand

12100 Accounts Receivable

12500 Provision for bad debt

13100 Inventories

14100 Supplies

15300 Prepaid Insurance

Fixed Assets:

17000 Land

17100 Buildings

17300 Equipment

17800 Vehicles

18100 Accumulated Depreciation – Buildings

18300 Accumulated Depreciation – Equipment

18800 Accumulated Depreciation – Vehicles

Liabilities Side Of Balance Sheet (account numbers start from 2)

Current Liabilities:

20110 Notes Payable- Line#1

20210 Notes Payable -Line #2

21000 Accounts Payable

22100 Wages Payable

23100 Interest Payable

24500 Unearned Incomes

Long-term Liabilities

25100 Mortgage Loan Payable

25600 Bonds Payable

25650 Discount Payable

Stockholders’ Equity

27100 Common Stock

27500 Retained Earnings

29500 Treasury Stock

Operating Incomes (account numbers start with 3)

31010 Sales

31022 Sales

32016 Sales

33110 Sales

Cost of Goods Sold (account numbers start from 40000)

41010 Cost of Goods Sold-Line#1 (COGS)

41022 Cost of Goods Sold -Line#2 (COGS)

42016 Cost of Goods Sold -Line#3 (COGS)

43110 Cost of Goods Sold -Line#4 (COGS)

Operating Expenses (account numbers start from 5)

50100 Salaries (Marketing)

50150 Payroll Taxes (Marketing)

50200 Supplies (Marketing)

50600 Telephones (Marketing)

59100 Salaries (others)

59150 Payroll Taxes (others)

59200 Supplies (others)

59600 Telephone (others)

Following the above structure, organization can structure their chart of accounts by expense, by sales department, marketing department, Engineering department and accounting department.

Still confused about how to set up chart of accounts? Connect with expert Online Accounting Tutor right now and learn how to set up chart of accounts for your business.

Why Ignoring Variance Analysis Will Cost You Sales?

Variance AnalysisVariance analysis is an integral part of any business to be successful. It is an important tool for budgetary control by means of evaluating the business performance by analyzing the variance between budgeted amount, planned amount or standard amount and actual amount spent.

What is Variance Analysis?

Variance analysis is the difference between standard cost and actual cost incurred during a given period. Variances analysis can be performed both at cost and revenues level. In other words, if a business owner wants to know what is his planned result and how it will look when comparing it with actual results so he can see the overall performance of the business.

For Example: ABC Company has its monthly sales short by $4000.00 as compared to the forecasted sales of $20,000. The percentage of change was 4000/20000 was 20%. This was due to the fact that business lost one big customer who used to buy the company products for $3,500.00 due to late deliveries of shipment to the customer. That resulted a miss in the forecast of sales.

This kind of variance analysis helps businesses to understand why there is was fluctuation in its business and what it can do make changes in order to prevent this in the future.

That was just one example of variance analysis that business can perform regularly, there are several other most commonly used variances that business can use to determine the health of its business such as:

Selling Price Variance: This analysis can be performed by subtracting standard selling price from actual selling price multiplied by actual number of units sold.

Purchase Price Variance: This can be performed subtracting the standard cost from actual price paid for materials used in the production and then multiplied by the actual number of units sold.

Labor Efficiency Variance: Labor efficiency is performed most by manufacturing company where the business owner would like to know what is the labor efficiency variance for a given period of time. This can be calculated simply by subtracting the standard quantity of labor consumed from the actual amount and then multiplied by the standard price per unit.

Direct Labor Rate Variance. This is very important tool that every business owners wants to know about what is the labor rate variance. This can be performed by subtracting standard labor cost from actual price paid for the direct labor and then multiplied by the number of units sold. Direct labor is considers those manpower who are directly used in the production such as machine operator.

Direct Material Yield Variance: This analysis can be performed by subtracting the total standard quantity of material from the actual quantity used then multiplied by the standard price per unit.

Fixed Overhead Spending Variance: Fixed overhead are those expenses that never changes irrespective of sales volume such as salary, rent, insurance, utility expenses. This analysis can be simply performed by subtracting standard cost from fixed overhead cost for any reporting period. If the standard cost exceeds the actual fixed overhead the analysis can assume that they have controlled and managed their fixed expenses well. In other words, if standard fix overhead expenses exceed actual fixed overhead expenses, then business is spending more than on its fixed expenses than its planned.

Variable Overhead Expenses Variance: Variable overhead expenses are those expenses which tend to change when sales volume change such as cost of cost of goods sold, sales commission. This variance can be performed by subtracting the standard variable cost per unit from actual cost incurred during any reporting period and the multiplied by the total actual units.

These variances helps the business owners to understand and manage the present cost and control the future cost. By applying these variances in practice, businesses or companies can save its cost and therefore increase the value of its stockholders.

Still confused about how to apply these variances analysis using excel? Connect with our online accounting tutor today and lean to how to become master in the variance analysis.

College Accounting Help-Find Those Fabulous Subject Scores through Tutor Pace!

College Accounting help

Are you beaten down by Accounting work at college level? Get into rapport with Tutor Pace’s online tutors for Accounting and throw out your subject discrepancies into a corner.

College Accounting help-get over your panic about advanced subject concepts

Managerial Accounting or Cost Accounting at college level could be irking with their deep details. You need a way out for your learning mishaps and that you find in college Accounting help through Tutor Pace. Get online with our tutors to seek help in topics for research papers, test prep or assignment. You could avail their services on demand or on schedule basis to gain the maximum benefit for the money you pay.

Case study or break up analysis could be the tormenting parts of your College Accounting tasks which would be made easy to do by Tutor Pace’s talented tutors with their exclusive strategies to help you through your difficulties in your subject. The online tools do their part tremendously well in connecting you to your tutor through voice chat or video call without interruption for a better subject experience through our site.

Make the best of your subject scores with College Accounting help through Tutor Pace.