Here, accounting = fun

What do you do when you're 7 and the lemonade business hits aslump so severe that you can't pay your bills?

"Stiff the grocer," came the advice from one budding accountant.

"Knock someone over," was the recommendation from another.

And on the touchy issue of what to do with those moldy oldlemons? "Mix them in with the good stuff."

It was all part of a recent seminar that struggled to answer thequestion: Can a group of adults learn the basics of accounting whileblowing whistles, wearing green eyeshades and following the financesof a 7-year-old lemonade magnate?

The answer, it seems, is yes.

The 29 students and one reporter attending the seminar raisedtheir collective grade from 70 percent on a pre-test of accountingknowledge to 91.4 percent after completing the intensive course thatclaims to teach a semester's worth of college-level accounting injust eight hours.

The claim of a college-level course was even harder to believewhen the first activity of the day was a rousing game of Simon Sez.

Margarete "Speedy" Stegner, who says her accountant couldn'tstop laughing when he learned she was going to be teaching theaccounting course, offered $100 to anyone who asked a stupidquestion. At the end of the day, the C-note remained pinned to theboard - proof, of course, that there is no such thing as a stupidquestion.

There are, however, stupid nicknames. Students, asked to makeup a nickname, chose monikers ranging from 007 to Giggles to Sis.

It was all part of the fantasy - to pretend we are grade-schoolchildren opening our own lemonade stands to while away the summerhours, make a few bucks and, of course, learn to read a balancesheet. Skills all 7-year-olds should possess.

We start with the contents of our piggy bank, all of $2. Add ina $5 loan from the world's most accommodating bank: Mom.

But, we must remember, it's only a loan. Mom wants the cashback. That means the figure gets recorded on the right side of abalance sheet, the side that shows who owns the stuff.

The left side shows what we own: the cash and the lemons andsugar we bought with the dough. That, we learn, defines the basicprinciple of accounting: Assets = Liabilities + Owners' Equity.

Business is booming. We sell 50 glasses of delicious homemadelemonade for 30 cents each - inflation has taken its toll - raking ina total $15 for the day. It's time to reconstruct the balance sheetand get ready for the next day.

It's the second of more than 10 balance sheets we will writetoday, including one that values our lemon inventory on the LIFO -Last In First Out - method and another that values it using FIFO -First In First Out.

We also learn that no matter how we value the inventory, we canuse the lemons in whatever order we want. In other words, justbecause the accountants say we are using the lemons we bought last,good lemonade moguls will squeeze the older lemons before they getmoldy.

Little-known secrets such as the difference between LIFO, FIFOand reality are the real value in the daylong Accounting Gameseminar. Or so says Tom "House" Dwyer, a partner with Checkers Simon& Rosner, the regional accounting firm based in Chicago and the localfranchisee for the Accounting Game.

The firm doesn't make any money on the course, which costsparticipants $395 each, but it gets paid off in smarter clients ornew clients, Dwyer said.

One of Dwyer's clients had been stacking monthly financialstatements - which cost him $1,500 a pop - on his credenza. He hadno idea how to read them.

Taking the Accounting Game course got the client "over the egoproblem of believing he was stupid in accounting," Dwyer said. Ittaught him the basics, so he could ask questions about the figuresand use the information in the accounting statements to makedecisions about his business.

Harvey "Buzz" Camins, vice chairman of Frain, Camins &Swartchild, a commercial real estate firm, spent the day in thecourse and learned that "I thought I knew a lot more than I know."

Leo "Corky" Ditewig, an engineering manager at Dresher Inc. whois interested in starting his own business, remembers some accountingfrom school, but that was a long time ago. The memories have faded abit.

For example, the entry on the income statement that reads COGSrefers to Cost of Goods Sold, or how much it cost you to put theproduct on the shelf. "Oh, that's what that means," Ditewig said ashe remembered.

Throughout the day, Stegner interrupts her teaching to take apicture with a Fisher-Price camera. After all, the balance sheet isa snapshot of how the business is doing right now, she says.

At other times, she stops to ask everyone to take a deep breath,or to pass out gold stars for a job well done. That, and hourlybreaks for healthy snacks and lemonade, are designed to help thelearning process. The hokey routines bring students back into focusand the healthy snacks - no candy bars and Danish here - keep theblood sugar up.

And we need a high energy level to make all these high-financedecisions.

Expansion, for example. Should we buy a mobile unit for $20?Or lease one for $8 a year? Buying would give us a depreciationwrite-off, but would use up all of our cash reserves. The Bank ofMom seems to have closed for the day. What's a 7-year-old to do?

And that's not the only headache. How about the friend whomoved away and stiffed us for $5? Or convincing the grocer to sellus inventory on credit?

The course creators may say it's easy to learn accounting, butno one ever said it would be easy to be a lemonade magnate.