Introduction to Accounting Principles

Penny L. Parker recently retired from her position as Coordinator of the Business Fundamentals Program and Professor in the Lawrence Kinlin School of Business at Fanshawe College in London, Ontario. Shortly after joining the accounting faculty in 1990, she assumed the role of Coordinator of the Business Accounting Program, which she held for several years. She also serves the Canadian Academic Accounting Association (CAAA) as a member and past Chair of the Education Committee and Vice-President of Colleges. She earned her Master’s in Business Administration from Laurentian University and is a past member of the Certified Professional Accountants (CPA) organization.

Penny’s practical financial accounting experience began prior to her academic career, with Ernst & Young Chartered Accountants in London, Ontario, where she was employed as a Senior Client Accountant serving small and mid-sized businesses. Her duties included providing monthly accounting and bookkeeping services as well as preparing year-end financial statements and tax returns for her clients. Prior to working in public accounting, Penny held a junior accounting position at an electronic supply company, where she gained hands-on experience in processing accounts payable/receivable, inventory and other accounting-related transactions. It was here Penny realized she enjoyed working with numbers and began to pursue a professional accounting designation (1990) with the Certified General Accountant (CGA) Association of Ontario.

After working in accounting for several years, Penny was provided with an opportunity to teach introductory accounting at Fanshawe. It was then she realized her passion for teaching—a passion that dated back to when she was a child, playing school in the basement of her parents’ home, where she handed out papers to a group of younger children and, using chalk to write on cement walls, taught them how to solve simple mathematical equations. Her years of education and experience working in both public and private accounting have helped her earn a reputation as a very knowledgeable and well-respected accounting professor. She also currently publishes a series of accounting practice sets, both manual and computerized, that are used by students at colleges and universities across the country.

In recent years, Penny has worked closely with AME Learning as a contributor on multiple editions of Key Accounting Principles, Volumes 1 and 2, and related titles.

Denise Cook recently retired from the position of Accounting Professor in the School of Business, IT & Management (BITM), at Durham College. She has held previous accounting faculty positions in the Faculty of Business and Information Technology at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology (UOIT) and in the School of Continuing Education at Durham College; for seven years, she also held the role of Accounting Program Coordinator at Durham College. Denise has a Bachelor of Mathematics/ Accounting (Honours Co-operative) from the University of Waterloo, and she has been an active Chartered Accountant (CA) since 1989 and a Chartered Professional Accountant (CPA) since the unification of the Canadian accounting bodies in 2013.

As a professor, Denise strives to educate students with basic accounting skills that apply to all aspects of their personal and professional lives. In her early years in the classroom, she taught accounting to health, sport and general business students, which required creativity to communicate transactions in a meaningful way in those respective disciplines. Shortly thereafter, the merger of professional accounting designations left a gap in the college curriculum for accounting majors. In her role as Accounting Program Coordinator, she has had the opportunity to develop and support new programs. Some of the programs Denise helped create are Accounting & Payroll (with an additional focus on Bookkeeping), Finance, and a university transfer program in conjunction with UOIT—most of which continue to be successful, in-demand programs at both the college and university level. All these experiences have attracted Denise to AME’s philosophy of teaching and learning.

Prior to her academic career, Denise spent over 20 years gaining practical accounting experience in the corporate world. She held various senior managerial positions at major multinational corporations including McGraw-Hill Ryerson, EDS Canada (HP), Citibank Canada and Thorne Ernst & Whinney (KPMG). In these roles, Denise specialized in financial management, internal and external audit, financial analysis and compliance with internal controls. With her decades of experience and extensive knowledge in finance, audit and accounting, Denise has become more passionate about sharing past experiences and making education more applicable to the students.

In recent years, Denise has been a contributing editor on numerous accounting textbooks in both Canada and the United States. She has been a co-author on multiple editions of Key Accounting Principles and related titles, and she is proud to support AME Learning in delivering quality accounting education to the next generation.