Preface¶
This book is specifically written to be a resource for the worker cooperatives Jetro Web Development and NOVA Web Development who are using it to run their cooperatives.
Both cooperatives are committed to the social and solidarity economy, and see open educational resources (OER). While there are numberous OER books on accounting, a search on the OER Commons site for “bookkeeping” comes back empty. This is very unfortunate, because for small democratic worker cooperatives like ours, it is bookkeeping and not accounting we need to learn how to do.
Of the three co-authors, only Ved has prior experience with bookkeeping, so we will be largely learning about it while writing this book. We take inspiration for doing this from computer science professor and textbook author Dr. Reema Thareja, who learned from her grandfather that “if you want to learn a subject, you must write a book on it.”
This book will evolve and develop as our learning and understanding do, but we release now in the hope that it will be useful to ourselves in our process of learning and to others who may draw valuable information from it.