I spent all of last week on a ‘Introductory Bookkeeping and Basic Accounting’ course at Kaplan Financial’s training centre in Leeds. I quite enjoyed it, but it felt strange being back in a college type learning environment after 5 years. It was just like being back at school, especially since I was one of the oldest people on the course – most of the attendees appeared to be school leavers who were commencing finance apprenticeships. It was a good course and I learnt a lot, but my main criticism was that there were too many on it – the first two days there were over 40 people. I thinks that’s too much for one tutor, especially when there are exercises to do as the trainer can’t really get round everyone. It’s a bit more difficult to ask questions or request help when there are 39 other people in the room. However, a lot of people were only attending the first 2 days, so from Wednesday the numbers shrunk down to about 25 which was better.

So… now I know all about double-entry bookkeeping, extracting trial balances and profit-and-loss accounts, VAT, amongst many other exciting things. And I now also know what loads of financey words mean that, to be honest, I’d heard about but couldn’t have clearly defined before – things like ‘fixed assets’, ‘liabilities’, and ‘nominal ledgers’.

We had a different tutor almost every day. They all seemed very nice. The lady on Thursday was lovely but had the oddest Yorkshire accent (I think she was from Hull) and pronounced ‘o’ like ‘ur’ (so nur rather than no, murst rather than most). On Thursday morning I spent about the first 5-10 minutes wondering why she kept talking about turtles. I couldn’t understand why it’d got to Thursday and this was the first time I’d heard about turtles in a financial situation – ‘Gather together your turtles?’ What on earth does that mean? It was only when she wrote on the board that I realised the ‘turtles’ were actually ‘totals’.