I'm delighted that we have an unexpected guest speaker today, my friend and business partner Kei Larios. Kei works for two worker cooperatives. She is a worker/owner of NOVA Web Development, where she and I are business partners, and she works with the cleaning co-op Magic Broom. Kei and I are also on the board together of the non-profit organization SECOSOL, whose mission is to become a seedbed of the solidarity economy.

Today in class we'll talk with Kei about her experience working in the solidarity economy, and brainstorm ways we begin to develop a solidarity economy business program here at the Grace Hopper Center that can provide real benefits to both our students and our community.

Here is how I described the DE Entrepreneurship class I hope to begin offering next year:

This entrepreneurship class is designed for students who want to make a positive impact on their community by starting their own worker cooperatives to provide goods and services needed by our community while also providing a decent and honest living for the co-op members. Students will explore how to determine community needs, devise a business plan around meeting an identified need, and then learn the skills required to start and run a democratically owned and operated business.

I'm really looking forward to our discussion today with Kei!

We all know the drill by now. Together in your groups read through chapter 4 of The Accounting Game, discussing what happens in the story and taking notes. Be sure to look for definitions of:

1. raw materials
2. finished goods
3. work-in-process (WIP)
4. accounts receivable
5. bad debt expense
6. interest expense
7. prepaid expense
8. current expense
9. accrual method (a not-only-cash method)
10. cash method

As you're reading through the chapter together at your table, assign someone to make a list of each transaction as you encounter it. Then be ready to answer the following questions after you finish:

• Which transactions do the authors say belong on which financial statements?
• Which of the 9 transactions listed on page 60 are sales, which are purchases, and which are expenses?
• How does the accrual method differ from the cash method? Describe this difference as simply as you can.
• In chapter 4, how do the income statements differ when using the cash method compared to when using the accrual method?
• On page 68 our authors tell us that, you can see that businesses have an opportunity here to be creative in how they account for things. What are they talking about here? List the specific example from our lemonade stand story that motivated this comment.
• What do our authors say about which accounting method businesses can use?
• According to our authors, what does the saying a tax deferred is a tax reduced mean?
• What is creative accounting as discussed in this chapter?

Phew!, that was a long and challenging chapter! We'll need to spend a bit of time on this, and we should also decide together in class how much we want to get out of it.