Most founders can read a bank balance. Few can read the business behind it.
A bank balance tells you what happened to money. Accounting tells you what happened to the business. This book teaches the difference, following one company's accounts from its first day to its seed round. You see why each rule exists, and you can trace any figure back to the transaction behind it.
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What you will learn
Four ideas, built from the ground up
How the three statements fit together
Why profit and cash part ways, and how the balance sheet, income statement and cash flow statement explain each other.
Judgement, not just rules
Revenue recognition, capitalisation, provisions and the other choices that change what a set of accounts says.
Running the business
Working capital, unit economics, break-even, budgets and runway, built from real figures.
Finance with AI
How to ask an AI tool for useful analysis, how to check what it gives you, and where the human judgement has to stay.
One company, followed all the way through
The book follows Oriel Sound Ltd, a small headset and software company, through 309 journal entries over two years: a loss-making first year, a profitable second year, a cash crisis in August and a seed round in October. Real companies (Amazon, Carillion, Wirecard, Costco, MTN Nigeria and others) appear where they show something Oriel cannot.
309
Journal entries, every one reconciled.
2 years
Of one company's accounts, from first day to seed round.
36
Chapters, from the accounting equation to AI agents in finance.
Inside the book
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The preface—where the book, and Oriel, begin.The trial balance, after the first twelve transactions.Charts throughout—here, when cash and revenue part ways.Why a profitable year produced no cash.Projected month-end cash under three scenarios.Common journal entries—one of ten appendices.
Contents
Thirty-six chapters in five parts, followed by ten appendices, a glossary and full references.
Part IWhat accounting is doing
The business underneath the numbers
The accounting equation
Double entry without the mysticism
Cash and accruals
From journal to trial balance
Part IIBuilding the accounts
Revenue
Expenses, assets and the capitalisation question
Receivables, payables and credit
Inventory and cost of sales
Prepayments, accruals and provisions
Fixed assets, depreciation and amortisation
Debt, equity and money that isn't income
Tax
Currencies
Oriel's first year
Part IIIReading the business
The income statement
The balance sheet
The cash flow statement
How the three statements speak to each other
Profit and cash
Part IVRunning the business
Working capital
Costs, margins and break-even
Unit economics
Burn and runway
Business models in the accounts
Judgement and the quality of earnings
Reading someone else's accounts
Budgets, forecasts and variances
Management accounts and product economics
Controls, fraud and audit
The month-end close
What good finance teams actually do
Part VAccounting when the machine does the recording
The free Excel workbook contains the original teaching spreadsheet the book grew from, Oriel's complete journal and accounts built entirely from formulas, the working capital, break-even, budget and runway models, and the four Build the company exercise sets with answer checks.
Free. Works in Excel, Google Sheets and Numbers.
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Founders and business owners who want to understand their own numbers.
Product, sales and operations leaders who sit in finance meetings.
Students and career changers who want accounting explained from the logic up.
Anyone using AI tools on financial data who needs to know when the answer is wrong.
About the author
Dr. Olaoluwa Samuel-Biyi is an entrepreneur, investor and educator working at the intersection of finance, technology and digital assets.
He is co-founder of Busha, one of Africa's first SEC-licensed digital asset exchanges, serving more than one million users and facilitating over $6 billion in traded value, and of Yousend, a stablecoin-enabled remittance company serving the African diaspora. Earlier in his career, he co-founded SureGifts, which became Nigeria's largest retail voucher provider, and was part of the early team at Jumia, where he led Business Intelligence.
He was named to Forbes Africa's 30 Under 30 in 2018. He holds a Master's degree from the London School of Economics, where he was a British Chevening Scholar, and earned his doctorate at IE Business School in Madrid. He tutors on Cambridge University's digital-asset executive programmes and has lectured at Hult International Business School and Anglia Ruskin University.
