WORKSHOP: Introduction to Resources for Accounting and Bookkeeping 

Whether you plan to be a business owner some day or have a fully set up business already, the importance of bookkeeping cannot be emphasized enough. While it is a legal requirement that you keep financial records of your organization, efficient bookkeeping provides in a bird's eye view, the current financial strength of your business. That information is key to better planning, higher cash flow and overall success. It helps attract investors, enables efficient decision-making and focus on the right areas. In this workshop we will learn about the importance of bookkeeping and become acquainted with some free tools to perform sample cases of bookkeeping by your own.

Basic financial statements like 'Profit and Loss' or 'Balance Sheet' are commonly used to evaluate the performance of businesses.  The more a business person is able to "tell the story" of his or her business by citing financial statements, the more confident listeners will feel that they are getting credible information about the business.  This can be critical if such listeners include potential lenders of funding to the business.  Bookkeeping efforts can be greatly facilitated by the use of specific software like Quickbooks or even freely-available on-line systems like Wave Accounting.  We will give hands-on demonstration of these in our workshop.

Jim Succop has been a SCORE volunteer for 15 years.  After an honorable discharge from the US Naval Reserve, he earned an MBA from University of Florida, and taught business and management as an adjunct at Santa Fe Community College.  He continues in his 28th year of working in Florida's Aging Network as an accountant and data manager.

Amnaya is the present Workshop Chair of SCORE North Central Florida. Being involved with SCORE for 2 years, he motivates people to learn basics of business ownership. Amnaya has backgrounds in mechanical engineering and materials science and possesses expertise in computational nanotechnology and high performance computation.