# THE SCHOOL — applied finance and accounting, for a life with AI

Funance · Lund Studio LLC · cut 2026-09-06

Not a CPA programme. Not accredited. Not tax, legal or financial advice. It teaches the material a first- and second-year accounting and finance curriculum teaches, applied to the student's own books, with an AI as tutor — and it names the moment a professional must be called.

Length: Six months · 26 weeks · 6 to 9 hours a week · online, with the tutor, the quiz, the homework, the test and the check in one student app
Price: $333, once — or $89 a term · Weeks 1 and 2 are free, the way the five minutes are
Textbook: OpenStax Principles of Accounting, Volume 1 (Financial) and Volume 2 (Managerial) — open, peer-reviewed, free (CC BY); plus the IRS publications and FASB concepts named in each week
Lab: Funance — the student keeps a real or a sandbox set of books for the whole six months; every exercise is a real entry
Teacher: THE TEACHER CARD — a skill card the student saves into Claude or Lundr; Socratic, on the student's own numbers; grades reasoning, never invents figures, never gives tax advice
Seat: THE SEAT — an LCC-1 card, punched to the student's capstone; a record of work done, not a licence, not a credential, and it says so on its face

## The week

- Read (90 min) — Two letters from the desk (the applied half) and the assigned OpenStax chapter (the theory half). The letters say what the chapter means on a Tuesday.
- Do (2–3 h) — The lab, in Funance, on your own books or the sandbox. Every exercise is a real entry; nothing is hypothetical for long.
- Sit (60 min) — The tutor session. Save the Teacher Card into Claude or Lundr; it runs the session — Socratic, on your numbers. It asks; you answer; it probes what you got wrong.
- Quiz (15 min) — Five questions, graded on the spot in the student app. Under four right, read the letters again before the homework.
- Homework (90 min) — The problem set — ten problems from the week, answered with the working. The AI grades reasoning before arithmetic and shows the working it expected.
- Test (45 min) — Three open questions, written. Graded by the AI on the student's own key against what a strong answer contains, with the score said aloud.
- Check (30 min) — The artefact — one document a week, from your own books, graded on the rubric. Six term checks and the capstone are also read by a person at the studio.

## The six terms

### Term I · The Language of Money (Weeks 1–4)
Every number on a screen is a sentence in a language. Learn to read it, then to write it.

- Week 1 · What a set of books is — Assets, liabilities, equity; the accounting equation; why a ledger is a story and not a pile. Read: OpenStax V1 ch. 1–2. Check: Write one page: the accounting equation, explained using five of your own ten lines, with what each line did to each side. The tutor scores it on the rubric; 8 or more and Week 2 opens.
- Week 2 · Debits, credits, and the double entry — Why every entry has two sides; T-accounts; the trial balance; what Funance is doing when it "routes a line". Read: OpenStax V1 ch. 3. Check: A trial balance built from eight of your own lines that balances, with a paragraph on the entry you found hardest and one sentence on what the trial balance did not prove. The tutor scores it on the rubric; 8 or more and Week 3 opens.
- Week 3 · Cash and accrual — Revenue when earned, expense when incurred; receivables, payables, accruals, deferrals; why the bank balance lies. Read: OpenStax V1 ch. 4 (adjusting entries). Check: One month reconciled from cash to accrual on one page: the cash P&L, every bridge line with its sentence, and the accrual income at the bottom. The tutor scores it on the rubric; 8 or more and Week 4 opens.
- Week 4 · Closing the books — The closing process; temporary and permanent accounts; the first look at a P&L and a balance sheet built from your own ledger. Read: OpenStax V1 ch. 5. Check: TERM I CHECK — one month closed from raw lines to two statements: the reconciled P&L with three figures traced to their lines, the balance sheet built by hand, and the equity roll-forward that proves it. Read by a person at the studio. 8 or more and Term II opens.

### Term II · Financial Accounting (Weeks 5–9)
The statements the world runs on — and how to build and read yours to the same standard.

- Week 5 · Revenue — The five-step model in plain words; timing; refunds and discounts; Shopify payouts split into sale and fee; what "revenue" is not. Read: OpenStax V1 ch. 9 (receivables) + ASC 606 concepts. Check: A one-page revenue policy for your business: what you sell, when each is delivered, deposits and retainers and subscriptions, refunds and discounts, payout splits — written for the bookkeeper who takes over tomorrow. 8 or more and Week 6 opens.
- Week 6 · Expenses, matching, and the things you own — Matching; capitalise vs expense; depreciation in plain words; inventory only as far as a solo operator needs it. Read: OpenStax V1 ch. 6, 10–11. Check: Your fixed-asset list with a depreciation schedule for each item and your three-line capitalisation policy — plus, if you sell goods, one month's COGS arithmetic. 8 or more and Week 7 opens.
- Week 7 · The balance sheet — What you have and what you owe on one day; liabilities and equity in detail; working capital; the owner's account. Read: OpenStax V1 ch. 12–13. Check: Your balance sheet as of last month end, every line explained in one sentence, the equity movement for the year reconciled to it, and five sentences comparing its shape with a public company's. 8 or more and Week 8 opens.
- Week 8 · Cash flow — The statement of cash flows; operating, investing, financing; the indirect method; why profit and cash disagree. Read: OpenStax V1 ch. 16. Check: Your quarter's statement of cash flows by the indirect method, tied to the bank's ending balance, with a paragraph on what the operating figure says about how you collect and pay. 8 or more and Week 9 opens.
- Week 9 · Reading statements — Ratios that matter to an operator (margin, current ratio, burn, days sales outstanding); reading a public 10-K in an hour; what auditors do. Read: OpenStax V1 Appendix A (financial statement analysis). Check: TERM II CHECK — a written analysis of your three statements and one public company's: six ratios each, the numbers behind them, and a page of sentences ending in “which means”. Read by a person at the studio. 8 or more and Term III opens.

### Term III · The Operator's Finance (Weeks 10–13)
Managerial accounting for one person who has to decide things: cost, price, burn, runway, and the scenario.

- Week 10 · Cost, price, contribution — Fixed and variable cost; contribution margin; break-even; why the price you charge is a math problem before it is a feeling. Read: OpenStax V2 ch. 2–3. Check: A break-even analysis for your real offering: the fixed/variable split with its rules, contribution, break-even in units and revenue, target-profit volume, margin of safety, and what a 10% price cut does. 8 or more and Week 11 opens.
- Week 11 · Budgets and forecasts — The operating budget; the cash budget; rolling forecasts; the difference between a plan and a wish. Read: OpenStax V2 ch. 7. Check: Your twelve-month operating budget and cash budget, every driving number with its assumption and evidence, the minimum-cash floor, and the three Scenarios stresses with their runways. 8 or more and Week 12 opens.
- Week 12 · Burn, runway, the decision — Burn rate as a trailing number; runway on operating cash only; the hire, the lease, the pivot as cash decisions. Read: Letters from the Funance desk; OpenStax V2 ch. 10 (short-term decisions). Check: A written decision memo on one real choice in the fixed shape — decision, numbers (runway before and after, payback month), the alternative, the carrying assumption, and what would change your mind. 8 or more and Week 13 opens.
- Week 13 · Variance and control — Actual against plan; what a variance means and what it does not; the monthly close as a control; fraud and error in small books. Read: OpenStax V2 ch. 8; V1 ch. 8 (fraud, internal controls). Check: TERM III CHECK — a month closed against your budget: the variance report with a sentence for every line over threshold, one revenue variance split into price and volume, and the one control you added, written into your close procedure and run once. Read by a person at the studio. 8 or more and Term IV opens.

### Term IV · Entities, Tax, and the Law of the Books (Weeks 14–17)
How the state sees your books. Taught as knowledge, ended with the sentence "and here is when you call a professional."

- Week 14 · The forms a business takes — Sole proprietor, LLC, S corporation, C corporation, partnership, nonprofit — as bookkeeping realities, not advice; owner's draw vs salary vs distribution. Read: IRS Pub. 334, 541, 542, 557 (read the summaries); Funance manual § Entities. Check: A map of your own entities with every money flow between them and you, each arrow labelled with its treatment, plus three CPA questions written as full sentences with the numbers beside them. 8 or more and Week 15 opens.
- Week 15 · Transfers, loans, and the line between you and the business — Inter-entity transfers; loans to and from owners; commingling and why it is dangerous; the transfer schedule as evidence. Read: IRS Pub. 583 (records), 334; Funance manual § Entities. Check: A clean transfer schedule for a quarter across your entities — every line named, every mirror agreeing, every loan with its page — with a paragraph in the voice you would use to an examiner on why none of it is income. 8 or more and Week 16 opens.
- Week 16 · Taxes an operator actually meets — Income tax as a concept; self-employment tax; quarterly estimates; sales tax basics; payroll taxes; the deductions people misunderstand — taught as vocabulary, never as advice. Read: IRS Pub. 505, 583; the Funance Tax room. Check: A quarter's CPA packet from the Tax room — set-aside at your rate, the mileage log, the Tax Binder CSVs with W-9 status — and three questions for the professional written in full sentences with the numbers beside them. 8 or more and Week 17 opens.
- Week 17 · Nonprofits, grants, funds — Fund accounting in plain words; restricted and unrestricted money; grant reporting; the program budget; why a nonprofit's books look different. Read: FASB ASC 958 concepts (net assets, functional expenses); IRS Pub. 557. Check: TERM IV CHECK — a grant report a funder would accept, produced from your grant's set of books, plus the three questions you would ask a CPA about your own entities, written as sentences with the numbers beside them. Read by a person at the studio. 8 or more and Term V opens.

### Term V · Capital and the Long Game (Weeks 18–22)
Corporate finance for a person: money over time, debt and equity, valuation, the owner's own future.

- Week 18 · Money over time — Time value of money; present and future value; discount rates; what interest actually costs. Read: OpenStax V2 ch. 11 (time value). Check: A present-value comparison of two real choices you face, at a discount rate you have chosen and defended in a sentence, with the working shown and a note on whether the answer survives a rate five points higher. 8 or more and Week 19 opens.
- Week 19 · Investing decisions — NPV, IRR, payback; capital budgeting for one person; the hurdle rate as a personal decision. Read: OpenStax V2 ch. 11. Check: A capital-budgeting memo on one real decision: NPV at two rates, IRR, payback, three sensitivities, the alternative, the carrying assumption, and what would change your mind. 8 or more and Week 20 opens.
- Week 20 · Debt and equity — Loans, lines, credit cards as debt; equity and dilution; the cost of each; reading a term sheet; when not to raise. Read: OpenStax V1 ch. 13–14; a public term sheet (Y Combinator SAFE). Check: A financing memo: $50,000 of debt and $50,000 of equity modelled three years out on your numbers — cash, ownership, cost — and what you would raise, how, and why, or why not. 8 or more and Week 21 opens.
- Week 21 · Valuation, plainly — Multiples, discounted cash flow in outline, what a small business is actually worth and to whom; the accountant's value vs the market's. Read: Letters; public comparables. Check: A one-page valuation of your business: SDE with a defended multiple, the asset floor, a DCF at a defended rate with its sensitivity, the two discounts named, and an honest range with a sentence on each end. 8 or more and Week 22 opens.
- Week 22 · The owner's own money — Paying yourself; retirement accounts as vocabulary; insurance and risk; the personal balance sheet; keeping the business from eating the person. Read: IRS Pub. 560 (summary); the personal entity in Funance. Check: TERM V CHECK — one memo in three parts: the Week 20 financing decision, the Week 21 valuation, and your household balance sheet beside the business's, with your pay rule and the answer to what the business owes you. Read by a person at the studio. 8 or more and Term VI opens.

### Term VI · Money and the Machine (Weeks 23–26)
Finance with an AI at the table: what to hand it, what never to, how to check it, and the capstone — a year of books, defended.

- Week 23 · What an AI can and cannot do with money — Reading vs deciding; hallucinated numbers; the review bin as a principle; audit trails; the skill card anatomy. Read: The Funance Skill Card; the manual § Your Claude. Check: Your own skill card, drafted in the studio's shape — head, wakes when, the loop, a NEVER of at least six lines, in the box — with the instruction that would have prevented the error you found this week. 8 or more and Week 24 opens.
- Week 24 · Prompts that hold up — Asking an AI for a number vs. asking for the lines behind it; verification; the difference between an answer and evidence. Read: Letters; the machine face of the manual. Check: A prompt book for your monthly close: one prompt per step, each written to return lines and a number, each with its check named beside it — plus your verification notes with the misses recorded. 8 or more and Week 25 opens.
- Week 25 · The close, with the machine — Building your own monthly close as a procedure: drop, route, review, reconcile, report, pack, hand off — with the AI doing what it should and you doing what it must not. Read: The manual § Month end; the Monthly Pack. Check: Your monthly close procedure, written on two pages and run once: the seven steps with who does each, the prompt book's checks, the pack recipe for a named reader, the time it took, and the override log. 8 or more and the capstone opens.
- Week 26 · The capstone — A year of books for a two-entity business — real or the school's sandbox — with statements, a budget, a variance report, a CPA packet, a financing memo, and the AI policy; defended to the tutor, reviewed by a person. Read: Everything. Check: THE CAPSTONE — a year of books for two entities with every artefact of the six months, every figure traceable, every question for a professional written as a sentence; defended to the tutor in three voices; read by a person. THE SEAT — an LCC-1 punched to the SHA-256 of your packet. Issued, never sold, not a licence.

## Weeks 1 and 2, in full (the free weeks; the rest travel in the six-month file with the school key)

### Week 1 · What a set of books is

**Objective.** By Friday you can look at any line in a ledger and say what it changed — what you have, what you owe, or what is yours — and why the equation always balances.

#### Letter 1 · A ledger is a story, not a pile

Open a bank statement and it is a pile: dates, names, amounts, in the order the bank noticed them. Open a ledger and the same lines are a story, because every one has been told where it belongs. That telling is the whole of bookkeeping, and the rest of accounting is what you can say once it is done.
Here is the entire vocabulary you need this week. An asset is something you have that is worth money — cash in the account, a laptop, an invoice a client owes you. A liability is something you owe — the credit card balance, the loan, the sales tax you collected and have not sent. Equity is what is left when you subtract what you owe from what you have; if the business closed today and paid everyone, equity is what walks out the door with you. That is it. Three words.
The one law: Assets = Liabilities + Equity. Not a rule you follow; a fact you cannot break, because equity is defined as the difference. Every line in a ledger changes two of these — or two things inside one of them — and the equation is still true afterward. When you buy a laptop with cash, one asset goes up and another goes down; the equation never noticed. When a client pays an invoice, cash goes up and the receivable goes down. When you charge software to the card, an expense goes up (which lowers equity) and a liability goes up. Two sides, every time.
Funance does this telling for you when it routes a line: it names the entity, the category and the treatment. This week you do it by hand, so that when the app does it for you, you can see whether it was right. That is the point of the school: not to replace the app, and not to replace the professional, but to make you the person in the room who knows what the numbers mean.

#### Letter 2 · Ten lines, by hand

This week's lab is ten lines. Pick a real bank statement — yours, your business's, or the school's sandbox statement — and enter ten transactions into Funance by hand, on the Drop tab, one at a time. Do not drop the file. Type them.
For each line, before you type it, answer three questions out loud: What did I have more of afterward? What did I have less of? Did I owe anyone anything new? A coffee on the business card: more expense (equity down), more owed (liability up). A client payment: more cash, less owed to me. A transfer from your personal account to cover a slow month: more cash in the business, and — this is the one people get wrong — not revenue. It is a contribution: equity up, because you put more of your own money in. Funance calls it Transfer · Contribution and keeps it out of profit and loss. Now you know why.
When your ten lines are in, open the Ledger and read them back as a story: "On the 3rd the business bought supplies; on the 5th a client paid; on the 9th I lent it money." If a line does not read as a sentence, it is not routed yet.
Then sit with the tutor. Save the Teacher Card into Claude, tell it "Week 1, Sit", and let it ask. It will pick three of your ten lines and make you defend them. Defend them. The arithmetic was never the hard part; the sentence is.

#### The lab
1. Create one entity in Funance (Settings): a name, a type, a state, a blended rate — 0 is fine this week.
2. Enter ten real transactions by hand on the Drop tab. For each, write in the memo what changed: e.g. "cash down, supplies expense up".
3. Open the Ledger; read your ten lines as sentences. Fix any that do not read.
4. Export the Ledger to CSV. Keep it; it is Week 2's raw material.

#### The tutor session
1. Tell the tutor: "Week 1, Sit. Here are my ten lines." Paste the CSV.
2. The tutor will choose three lines and ask, for each: what went up, what went down, what is owed. Answer before it explains.
3. Ask it one question you could not answer from the letters. Write its answer in your own words.

#### The homework
1. You pay $1,200 rent from the business account.
2. A client pays a $3,000 invoice you sent last month.
3. You buy a $2,400 laptop on the business credit card.
4. You move $5,000 from your personal savings into the business.
5. You take $1,500 out to pay yourself.
6. You charge $80 of software to the card.
7. You send a $4,000 invoice; nobody has paid yet.
8. You pay the credit card bill, $2,480.
9. A customer refund of $200 goes out.
10. The bank charges a $15 fee.

#### The check
Write one page: the accounting equation, explained using five of your own ten lines, with what each line did to each side. The tutor scores it on the rubric; 8 or more and Week 2 opens.

### Week 2 · Debits, credits, and the double entry

**Objective.** By Friday you can write any transaction as a two-sided entry, post it to T-accounts, prove the arithmetic with a trial balance — and say what a trial balance cannot prove.

#### Letter 1 · Left and right, not good and bad

Debit means left. Credit means right. That is the whole of it, and the reason people find it hard is that they keep looking for a moral in it. There is none. A debit is not money in and a credit is not money out; a debit is an entry on the left side of an account and a credit is an entry on the right, and the rule that makes the system work is that every transaction has at least one of each, and the two sides always add to the same number.
Which side makes an account bigger depends on what kind of account it is. Assets, expenses and draws grow on the debit side. Liabilities, equity and revenue grow on the credit side. Draw the equation from Week 1 with a line down the middle — assets on the left, liabilities and equity on the right — and the rule falls out: the things on the left of the equation grow on the left of their accounts; the things on the right grow on the right. Expenses and draws reduce equity, so they behave like the opposite of equity, which puts them on the left.
Try it on last week's coffee. Meals expense grows: debit Meals. The credit card balance grows: credit Credit card payable. Two sides, equal amounts. A client pays an invoice: debit Cash (an asset, growing), credit Accounts receivable (an asset, shrinking — a credit shrinks an asset). Notice that this entry never touched revenue; the revenue was recorded when the invoice went out. If your ledger shows revenue twice for one job, you have found the most common error in small books.
An account drawn as a T — name on top, debits down the left, credits down the right — is a T-account, and posting is just copying each side of each entry into its T. Foot each column, take the difference, and you have the account's balance. Do this for every account and list the balances in two columns and you have a trial balance. If the columns agree, the arithmetic is sound. If they do not, something was posted once, or on the wrong side, or with two digits swapped.

#### Letter 2 · What Funance is doing when it routes a line

Funance does not show you debits and credits, and that is deliberate — you are reading a ledger, not keeping a general ledger. But every routed line is a two-sided entry underneath. A line comes in from a bank download or the Drop tab with an amount and the account it moved through. When you route it to Software, the app has decided the other side: the bank account went down, Software expense went up. When a deposit is routed to Revenue: cash up, revenue up. The category is one side of the entry; the account the money moved through is the other.
The Special categories are where a person who knows this week's material earns their keep. Owner Draw is a debit to draws and a credit to cash — it lowers equity, it is not an expense, and it never appears on the P&L. Transfer · Contribution is the reverse. Transfer · Loan between two of your entities is a debit to cash in one set of books and a credit to a loan payable, with the mirror in the other set; the Transfers & loans schedule in Reports is that mirror, printed. If a transfer shows up as revenue in one entity and expense in the other, you have invented a profit and a loss out of moving your own money across the street.
This week's lab makes the hidden entries visible. Export the Ledger to CSV, take eight lines, and write the journal entry for each in the old form: date, the account debited, the account credited, the amount. Post them to T-accounts. Foot them. Prepare the trial balance. It will balance if you have done it right — and here is the sentence to carry for the rest of the course: a trial balance proves that debits equal credits; it does not prove that any line is in the right place. A software subscription routed to Rent balances perfectly. Only reading catches it. That is what the Review bin is for, and what you are for.

#### The lab
1. Export your Ledger to CSV (last week's ten lines, or a real month). Choose eight lines that touch at least four different categories, one of them a Special.
2. For each line write the journal entry in a sheet or on paper: date · debit account · credit account · amount. Name the bank or card account explicitly on the side the money moved through.
3. Post all eight to T-accounts, foot each column, and prepare a trial balance. Confirm the two totals agree; if they do not, find the entry — do not force it.
4. Route one line deliberately wrong (a software charge to Rent) in the sheet only, and confirm the trial balance still balances. Write one sentence about what that means.

#### The tutor session
1. Tell the tutor: “Week 2, Sit.” Paste your eight journal entries and the trial balance.
2. The tutor will hand you five messy events — a refund that carried a fee, a personal purchase on the business card, a client prepayment, a loan draw, a card bill paid. Write each entry before it explains; it will probe the side you got wrong.
3. Ask it to show you the entry underneath one Funance Special category of your choosing. Write it down in your own words.

#### The homework
1. A client pays $2,000 by bank transfer for work you invoiced last month.
2. You buy $600 of supplies on the business card.
3. You put $10,000 of your own money into the business account.
4. You pay $1,800 rent from the account.
5. The bank lends the business $15,000; it lands in the account.
6. A $500 loan payment goes out: $450 principal, $50 interest.
7. You send a $4,500 invoice; nothing has been paid.
8. You take $2,000 out to pay yourself (a sole proprietor or single-member LLC).
9. Your trial balance shows debits of $20,150 and credits of $20,050.
10. Your trial balance balances at $41,300 each side, but a $300 software charge was routed to Rent.

#### The check
A trial balance built from eight of your own lines that balances, with a paragraph on the entry you found hardest and one sentence on what the trial balance did not prove. The tutor scores it on the rubric; 8 or more and Week 3 opens.

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Not a CPA programme · not accredited · not tax, legal or financial advice · the seat is a record of work, not a licence · © 2026 Lund Studio LLC