Business Operations

Basic Accounting For Online Businesses

Learn enough accounting to keep accurate books, understand where your money is going, and prepare your online business for tax time without becoming an accountant.

This practical beginner course starts at zero, explains the essentials in plain English, and then walks you through setting up a real set of books and recording common business transactions in Xero.

Buy This Course - $49 Get Total Membership

See What You'll Learn

Purchase this course for $49, or get it with every current and future course in the Elder Academy Total Membership.

Basic Accounting for Online Businesses course

Understand The Basics Make sense of accounts, double-entry bookkeeping, and the accounting equation without getting buried in theory.

Set Up Your Books Organize the accounts your online business needs and build a clean foundation in accounting software.

Record Real Transactions Follow along as common income, purchases, credit-card payments, and owner investments are entered.

Know How You're Doing Read a profit and loss statement and balance sheet so you can understand the financial state of your business.

Accounting Without The Overwhelm

You don't need to become an accountant. You do need to understand your business's money.

Ignoring the books makes it easy to overspend, lose track of your results, and arrive at tax time with a pile of statements and no clear picture of what happened.

This course gives you the small amount of accounting knowledge an online business owner actually needs. You'll learn the logic behind the numbers, put it into practice with real software, and build a routine you can keep current without taking time away from the business.

Understand double-entry bookkeeping and why every transaction affects at least two accounts.
Distinguish assets, liabilities, equity, revenue, and expenses.
Organize registers and a chart of accounts with clear, consistent categories.
Set up checking and credit-card accounts in Xero without relying on automatic categorization.
Record owner investments, equipment purchases, payments, customer revenue, and business supplies.
Run the reports that show performance and organize the information needed at tax time.

Inside The Course

Build books you can understand and maintain

Start with the ideas behind accounting, then apply them to a real online business using practical transactions and reports.

Learn The Accounting Foundation

Understand double-entry bookkeeping and the simple relationship among assets, liabilities, and owner's equity.

Organize Your Business Accounts

See how registers and a chart of accounts keep cash, credit cards, revenue, expenses, and equity organized.

Read Your Financial Reports

Learn what a profit and loss statement and balance sheet tell you, how they differ, and why both matter.

Set Up And Use Accounting Software

Follow along in Xero as accounts are created, transactions are entered, mistakes are corrected, and balances are checked.

Stay Current And Prepare For Tax Time

Build a simple bookkeeping habit and generate organized year-end reports for preparing your business taxes or working with a CPA.

This Is For You

You run an online business, but accounting still feels intimidating.

You want to keep your own books, know whether the business is making money, and stop dreading the paperwork waiting for you at the end of the year.

The Outcome

A simple accounting system you can actually keep up with.

You will leave understanding how your books fit together, how to record everyday transactions, how to review the business, and what to prepare when tax time arrives.

Your Instructor

Learn from someone who's been building and operating online businesses for 30 years.

I'm John Elder. I've built and sold online companies, created software used by millions of people, operated an affiliate network of more than 4,000 websites, and taught 20 million people through Codemy.com.

Every real business needs clean books. I designed this course to teach entrepreneurs the practical accounting essentials they need to stay informed, organized, and ready for tax time without turning accounting into a second career.

This course is for educational purposes and does not provide accounting, tax, or legal advice. Tax rules and individual circumstances vary. Consult a qualified accountant or tax professional when you need advice about your business.

Choose this course.
Or get everything.

Purchase Basic Accounting For Online Businesses for $49, or get every current and future Elder Academy course with the Total Membership.