The master budget for a manufacturing company is one of the most comprehensive budgeting processes, requiring the budgets to be created in order, starting with the budgeted sales, all other budgets depending on sales budget. Every organization has a budgeting process weather simplistic budging or complicated budgeting. Master budget for a manufacturing company provides the principles needed for any budgeting and planning process.
This comprehensive problem will be unorthodox by putting the theory and software side by side, by showing how the software uses the theory as we go, by showing the relevance of theory in the use of software as we learn, the hope being that this understanding of application will help motivate learning and persevering through learning theory. We will be recording start up journal entries for a new company, entries most every new business needs to set up. We will record these entries both in Excel as well as in QuickBooks and will provide a live Google Sheet that can be used to work the problem as a group during the presentation and, or, can be used to copy to your Google account for future use. When working with both students and business owners, I have noticed that we often have a disconnect between accounting theory and accounting practical business use. Business owners often have some experience with QuickBooks or some other accounting software and do not see a clear relationship to the journal entries that software uses and students often feel like they are putting a lot of faith in accounting theory being useful down the road, knowing that computer software will likely be used in practice. We will show both aspects at the same time. If you have Excel I highly recommend downloading the Excel worksheet and working the problem with us or working the problem later with the recording as a guide. If you do not have Excel you can make a copy of the Google Sheet, Google Sheets being free for anybody who has a Google account. If we do not have access to Excel, or even if we do, I highly recommend getting familiar with Goodle Sheets. We have also provided access to a QuickBooks backup file but we do not expect everyone to have access to QuickBooks. If you do not have access to QuickBooks do not worry. We want to present QuickBooks as an example of how the theory is applied. We can learn the details of QuickBooks at another time.