Accounting Analytics
Welcome
Accounting Analytics
A Practical Approach
Excel SQL Power BI
Northwind Traders AdventureWorks Cycles ERPNext Demo Company
Open Educational Resource
Accounting Analytics: A Practical Approach
This is an open educational resource textbook that teaches accounting students to extract, prepare, analyze, and visualize financial and operational data using three tools widely adopted in professional practice. The book is designed for undergraduate and graduate accounting and business students with no prior analytics or programming experience.
What This Book Covers
The book is organized into twenty chapters across five parts. Part I establishes the conceptual foundations of accounting analytics, including data types, data quality, and the relational database model. Part II teaches data preparation, descriptive analytics, statistical modeling, and audit testing in Microsoft Excel. Part III introduces SQL for querying relational databases, joining tables, performing aggregations, and conducting population-level audit analytics. Part IV covers data visualization principles and interactive dashboard design in Microsoft Power BI. Part V integrates all three tools in applied projects spanning financial reporting analytics, cost and management accounting, forensic accounting, and emerging technologies.
Every chapter follows a consistent structure that includes learning objectives, a professional scenario, conceptual narrative with embedded guided tutorials, and end-of-chapter assessments. Applied exercises are organized across three accounting perspectives: financial accounting, managerial accounting, and auditing. Five comprehensive cases, one per part, provide extended multi-tool investigations. The Preface describes the pedagogical design in detail.
The Datasets
Three realistic datasets accompany this book, provided in both Excel workbook and SQLite database formats. Students use the same data across all three tools throughout all twenty chapters.
Northwind Traders is a small wholesale food distribution company with eight core tables. It serves as the primary dataset for foundational chapters due to its simplicity and accessibility.
Adventure Works Cycles is a mid-size multinational bicycle manufacturer with approximately seventy tables spanning sales, production, purchasing, and human resources. It supports cost accounting, production analysis, and purchasing cycle exercises.
ERPNext Demo Company is a full enterprise resource planning environment with a complete accounting module including a chart of accounts, general ledger, journal entries, cost centers, and budgets. It supports financial statement preparation, audit testing, and integrated reporting.
Open Access
This textbook is an open educational resource distributed at no cost. All software tools used in the exercises are free or included with standard institutional licenses. The datasets are freely available in both Excel and SQLite formats. SQLite requires no server installation and runs on any operating system. No student should be prevented from developing analytics skills because of software cost or platform limitations.
This work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0). You are free to share and adapt the material for any purpose, including commercial use, provided you give appropriate attribution and distribute any adapted versions under the same license.
Contributing
This book is a living project. Contributions from instructors, students, and practitioners are welcome and encouraged. If you find an error, have a suggestion for improving an exercise, or want to propose a new example, you can open an issue or submit a pull request on the book’s GitHub repository. Feedback on clarity, accuracy, and coverage helps make this resource better for everyone who uses it.
If you encounter an error in the text, examples, datasets, or links, please report it on the GitHub Issues page. Issue reports help us correct problems quickly and keep the book reliable for everyone using it.
If you are an instructor using this book in your course and would like to share your experience or adapted materials, please reach out through the repository. The OER model works best when the community around the resource is active.
Citation
If you use this book in your teaching or research, please cite it as:
Codesso, M. (2026). Accounting Analytics: A Practical Approach.