This course is an introduction to corporate financial statements, as well as the accounting principles and procedures by which those statements are constructed. This course has two objectives that we will pursue concurrently. First, you will learn the mechanics of accounting from an internal/preparer perspective: you will learn how financial statements are constructed, how they relate to one another, and how they change in response to common business activities. Second, you will become a more sophisticated external user of financial statements by learning to infer certain transactions and events from the financial statements.