Accounting Analytics: An Integrated Approach
Accounting Analytics: An Integrated Approach
first edition, revision 2027.1
This open educational resource textbook teaches accounting and business students to extract, prepare, analyze, and visualize financial and operational data using Microsoft Excel, SQL, and Microsoft Power BI, three tools widely adopted in professional practice. Every technique is taught through accounting questions, and every example draws on the data of a single company, so students see how analytics supports financial reporting, management decisions, and audit work.
The book is designed for undergraduate and graduate accounting and business students with no prior analytics or programming experience. Applied exercises in the chapters of Parts I to IV look at each technique from the perspectives of financial accounting, managerial accounting, and auditing. Throughout the book, the Charles River Accounting Dataset provides a common setting for learning across all three tools.
What This Book Covers
The chapters of the book are organized into five parts. Part I establishes the conceptual foundations of accounting analytics, including data types, data quality, and the relational database model, with first tutorials in the Excel workbook, and closes with a case that prepares the company’s data for analysis. Part II teaches data preparation, descriptive analytics, forecasting, budgeting, what-if analysis, 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 offers three independent capstone cases, in financial reporting, managerial accounting, and auditing, each drawing on the full dataset and on each tool where it fits the problem; a course can assign any one of them as a final project.
Where to Start
- Every reader can begin with the Preface, which explains how the book is organized, how each chapter works, and what software it needs, and whose About the Dataset section introduces the company behind the data.
- Students can then turn to its To the Student section, and instructors to its To the Instructor section.
- The Downloads page holds the book and dataset files and each chapter’s slides and companion files.
Open Access
This textbook is an open educational resource distributed at no cost, like its dataset. DB Browser for SQLite and Power BI Desktop are free as well. Desktop Excel needs a license, which your institution may provide, as the Preface’s What You Need section explains. No student should be prevented from developing analytics skills because of software cost or platform limitations.
Unless otherwise noted, this work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0). You may share and adapt the material, including for commercial use, provided you give appropriate credit, link to the license, indicate any changes, and distribute adaptations under the same license. Do not add restrictions that limit the permissions the license provides.
Contributing
This book is a living project, and contributions from instructors, students, and practitioners are welcome. To report an error in the text, examples, datasets, or links, or to suggest an improvement, open an issue on the GitHub Issues page. To propose a change directly, submit a pull request on the book’s GitHub repository. Instructors who use the book in their courses are invited to share their experience and adapted materials through the repository. The open educational resource model works best when the community around the resource is active.
Citation
This is the first edition of the book, revision 2027.1; the Downloads page links its files. If you use this book in your teaching or research, please cite it as:
Codesso, M. (2027). Accounting analytics: An integrated approach. Accounting Analytics Hub. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23425591