ADVANCED ACCOUNTING

Our goal in writing this book was to satisfy the needs of today’s accounting students by providing the most contemporary, relevant, engaging, and student-oriented textbook available. We think that we have accomplished that objective by maintaining a conceptually rigorous discussion of the material in an intuitive and student-friendly style. Prior to writing this book, we both taught advanced financial accounting for many years, and we both felt that the structure and format of available textbooks contributed to the difficulties that our students have had in learning the material. Several examples come to mind: Too many issues discussed simultaneously. Taken individually, consolidation issues can be difficult for students to grasp. The learning process is made all the more difficult when a particular topic (intercompany sales of assets, for example) is presented using alternative methods of pre-consolidation equity investment bookkeeping (e.g., equity, partial equity, and cost). Our experience—and the experience of many of our focus group participants—indicates that students are generally confused by the mixing of bookkeeping approaches in the main-chapter discussion of most textbooks. To address this issue, we present only two pre-consolidation bookkeeping approaches: equity method and cost method. In each consolidations-related chapter, we begin the consolidations-related discussion with the equity method because it provides the clearest and easiest-to-understand linkage between the parent’s pre-consolidation financial statements and the consolidated financial statements. We then use a page-edge border to very clearly mark the pages in which we discuss cost-method consolidations procedures. By clearly distinguishing between the two approaches, we make it much easier for instructors and students to know exactly which approach we are covering. In addition, this makes tailoring the material much easier. For example, if an instructor wishes to only cover the equi