Accounting Analytics
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 contains twenty chapters organized into 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 with learning objectives, an opening scenario, conceptual narrative with embedded guided tutorials, and end-of-chapter assessments. Applied exercises in each chapter address three accounting perspectives, namely financial accounting, managerial accounting, and auditing. Five comprehensive cases, one per part, close each part with multi-tool investigations that integrate the material from all chapters in the part. The Preface describes the pedagogical design in detail.
The Dataset
One integrated dataset accompanies this book. The Charles River Accounting Dataset is built around a fictional mid-size home furnishings company that sells goods through wholesale and direct-to-business channels, manufactures selected product lines in-house, and operates an hourly design services practice. The database contains 77 tables organized into ten groups and ships as an SQLite database, an Excel workbook, and a CSV package, so students work with the same underlying data in every tool the book covers. The About the Dataset section in the front matter describes the company, the ten table groups, the business cycles, and the distribution formats in full detail.
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 dataset is freely available in SQLite, Excel, and CSV 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-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). You are free to share and adapt the material for noncommercial purposes, 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.