Peer Review

This practice set is intended to supplement various accounting concepts as they are being covered in class by providing hands-on experience znd allowing students to actually see how economic events affect financial reporting. Concepts are integrated well and both current and relevant. Reading the article referenced on the Instructor Information page is extremely helpful.

The approach to the material is not self-explanatory. Beginning students would
need a lot of assistance in using the module. Students input data for sales and
inventory on Information Sheet (p. 3) in the module. The sales information is
automatically carried forward to the General Journal spreadsheet on (p. 5), but
is not being carried forward into any other worksheet such as the General Ledger. Therefore, it is assumed that the students will manually input such information. For example, even when the journal entries are made in the General Journal (p.5), they are not automatically entered in the account ledgers. As this is a practice set and not a commercial accounting system, it is not essentail for this to occur as long as instructions are clear. The module would be enhanced, however, if more of the students? journal entries were carried forward into other pages in the spreadsheet.

Including the revenue and expense accounts in a worksheet labeled ?General Ledger ? Owner?s Equity may be somewhat misleading without explanation. While these accounts are ultimately closed to the Income Summary account and then Retained Earnings, including them here may imply that they are contra-equity accounts associated with the balance sheet. It would be more appropriate to have a separate General Ledger tab labeled ?General Ledger ? Income statement accounts.?

Sweet Treats is a very innovative teaching tool that can be used to illustrate all the concepts generally included in a principles of financial accounting course through the accounting cycle. Relationships between concepts are explicitly demonstrated through the use of linked Excel worksheets. Students become active participants in the learning process by actually managing the economic events that take place in a real business. The information sheet that teams submit to document their management responsibilities is an excellent feature. The assessment questions and grading rubric also included are very useful instructional tools.

Students will get a good grounding in the financial statement preparation process from using the module. In many accounting programs, learning about debits and credits has been done away with in the beginning courses. It
is rewarding to know that this has not occurred in all programs.

Getting the series of worksheets ready for use is somewhat confusing given the instructions included for the instructor. Learning objectives are not explicitly identified. First time instructor-users will be best served and save time by deleting all data from all of the worksheets. If prior period data is to be included in the financial statements, then the balance sheet T-accounts need to include beginning balances and they do not.

With appropriate instructional enhancements, student users will find the simulation easy to use. Each worksheet is designed rather nicely to minimize scrolling per screen. All linked worksheets work as intended.

The instructions for instructors on how to use the series of worksheets are very unclear, difficult to follow and misleading. Anyone choosing to use this practice will spend much start up time trying to figure out just exactly how it works and what information needs to be given to students.

Cells have not been protected so anyone can inadvertently delete information that should not be deleted. Students are warned that they will corrupt the functionality of the worksheets should this occur.

Worksheets are not consistently titled with the name appearing on the tab identifier, nor are they page numbered. When the worksheets are printed, users cannot easily identify or keep them in the order intended with this information having been omitted. Visually the spreadsheets could be improved by picking a different font and color for the headings on the financial statements.

Ease of use could be improved by having more interactively in the module. For
example, a partial entry might be made into the Ledger from the Genearl Journal. Such an approach would provide guidance to students as they worked through the journal entries, but it would not be so automatic that they would lose their understanding of the mechanics of the accounting cycle.

Finally, the recommended approach in using Sweet Treats for the first time would be to delete all existing data from every worksheet that contains original data and begin from scratch.