USA How to prepare myself for Accounting courses

[William55]

I am currently done with most of my electives and now I am starting my accounting courses. My question is how I can better prepare myself for my accounting courses with my free time? What math can I teach myself now that is required?

I have an Algebra I, Algebra II, Intermediate math, and College algebra math book. What areas/formulas do I need to learn? What books can I buy to read that will be beneficial to me for my accounting courses? I will have some time off during my summer break (2 months) and a little bit of extra time with two easy elective classes next term. I would like to take as much advantage of my free time as possible for preparing myself!

So if anyone has any suggestions on Accounting books or ways I can prepare myself is greatly appreciated, my greatest concern is the math that I need to know for accounting/Business classes listed below. Here are my accounting classes...

Business Mathematics
Business Statistics
Business Ethics

Accounting for Financing/Investing Activities
Cost Accounting
Intermediate Accounting
Intermediate Accounting II
Federal Income Tax

Advanced Accounting I
Advanced Accounting II
Auditing
Financial Administration
Seminar in Applied Accounting

Thank you everyone for your time reading this and posting!

 

[kirby]

Strangely enough, for a profession involved with numbers the level of math required is at Algebra 1 level for most things, save for Statistics. So if math is your concern then get a head start on the business statistics.
So, yes, very little math. Some say "CPA" stands for "Couldn't Pass Arithmetic"

 

[William55]

So what math do I need to learn exactly for Business Mathematics and Statistics? I believe I have algebra 1 down fairly well, its the statistics that is worrying me but I don't know what to study exactly!

 

[kirby]

Statistics is just applied math. So you should not study something else (like trig, for example) to prepare - you just need to study statistics to prepare. Topics include probability, normal distributions and sampling. The saving grace for business folks is that this does not get into very heavy ivory tower theory but into how this is applied to solve real problems. For example, if you take a small sample of something, how confident are you that you can predict something about that something as a whole?
Anyway, spend time on this stuff and that will help.

 

[chinweike]

Hi William55,
What I did in my time was to listen to business maths videos. You will find loads of them on youtube. Cheers

 

[ACC]

The maths involved in accounting are not very complex - there are some specialist areas where your maths skills need to be greater (e.g. treasury, risk), but bookkeeping and management accounting will not get much more complex than high school algebra.