The top 10 accountancy books for 2023

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10 books to put on your Christmas list that will give you different perspectives, as well as better insight and understanding of technical, and financial practices.

1. How to Build a Better Business Plan: A hands-on action guide for business owners by Alastair Thomson

Alastair Thomson has been a CFO for over 30 years, and How To Build A Better Business Plan is a no-nonsense and easily understandable guide to creating a brilliant business plan. It will give you valuable insight, whatever stage you’re at in your business, from idea conception to getting prepped to exit. Find out the biggest source of competition for most businesses, the real value of preparing a business plan and how investors and lenders really read a business plan.

Buy the book

2. The Bookkeeper Rises: Build a successful bookkeeping business that works for you and gives you the life you really want by Jo Wood and Zoe Whitman

Jo and Zoe are champions of the bookkeeping industry who run The 6 Figure Bookkeeper Club. Their best-selling book is focused on helping you to see yourself as a business owner as well as a bookkeeper. This book will help you to: start a bookkeeping practice that is right for you, find great clients, design services that transform your clients’ businesses, charge more than you think bookkeeping is worth, and build a practice that grows with you and your clients.

Buy the book

3. The Finance Book: Understand the numbers even if you’re not a finance professional
by Stuart Warner and Si Hussain

This book lays out a huge amount of useful financial information in a simple format to help you make sense of terminology and concepts of business finance.

Buy the book

4. The First Minute: How To Start Conversations That Get Results by Chris Fenning

A successful finance professional will be a successful communicator. It’s so important to get your team and clients on board with you and to be to source the information from them that you require. This book will help you to get people’s attention to get your message across in the workplace.   

Buy the book

5. Cash Flow Surge: 101 No-Cost and Low-Cost Fast Action Strategies to Boost Your Business Cash Flow by Alastair Thomson

Alastair Thomson specialises in helping businesses increase revenues, reduce costs and build stronger cash flow. In this ‘dip in anywhere’ book, he gives 101 ideas and real-life examples to build sales, reduce costs and conduct a five-minute check of a business to pinpoint any big strategy problems.

Buy the book

6. Bookkeeping and Accounting All-in-One For Dummies by Jane Kelly

This popular book gives a plain English overview of basic bookkeeping, as well as daily, monthly and quarterly tasks, preparing financial statements and managing the business in order to keep things in order to comply with UK standards. It also goes through options for the latest available bookkeeping software and accounting practices.

Buy the book

7. The Weird and Wonderful World of Accountancy by Holly Close and Marvin Close

Fighting against the nonsense notion that accountants are boring, this book explores fascinating facts and stories that will make you never look at finance in quite the same way. From Ancient Rome to the French revolution, the invention of bubblegum to celebrities who can also do double-entry bookkeeping.

Buy the book

8. No One Would Listen by Harry Markopolos

No one would listen is a true financial thriller which explains how Harry Markopolos and his team uncovered Bernie Madoff’s scam (the largest ever Ponzi scheme, which defrauded thousands of investors out of tens of billions of dollars over 17 years or more) years before it made headlines and how they desperately tried to warn the government, the industry, and the financial press.

Buy the book

9. The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel

With almost 30,000 reviews on Amazon (94% of them 4 or 5 stars), this really is a must-read book about money. The book offers a clear and concise method of how to have a positive outlook in an increasingly complicated financial environment. A practical finance book that gives a unique perspective on money from the lens of human psychology.

Buy the book

10.  Warren Buffett and the Interpretation of Financial Statements: The Search for a Company with a Durable Competitive Advantage by Mary Buffet and David Clark

Written by those with true insider knowledge, this book details Warren Buffett’s interpretation of financial statements with anecdotes and quotes from the master investor himself. It does a good job of breaking down the financial parts of a company, providing insight into income statements, balance sheets and statement of cash flow.

Buy the book

Further Reading

Sophie Cross is the Editor of Freelancer Magazine and a freelance writer and marketer at Thoughtfully.

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