BaSIS Board^TM

BaSIS Board is a concept map for accounting. It's a diagram that presents financial data in a way that helps people make sense of the information. Think of it as accounting on a page. A graphical general ledger. BaSIS Board makes accounting much easier to explain, understand and learn.

The name comes from Balance Sheet and Income Statement, the two key financial reports that describe anyone’s financial position and performance.

This page offers free downloadable PDFs of printable posters or reference sheets to use in your own financial conversations.

In the early 1980s Apple computer introduced the first computer that used pointing instead of typed commands to control the device. That Macintosh computer changed how the world interacts with computers.

Today we all carry a computer with a GUI in our pockets. BaSIS Board is like a graphical user interface for accounting. Now anyone can explain key accounting concepts by pointing to the diagram. This is particularly significant because all of accounting is based upon a duality, which means that in any financial situation there are always two, not one, aspects to consider.

The reason accounting has been difficult for so many people is mostly because they consistently confuse the two aspects of various financial situations. For example, when you earn cash by working, the two financial considerations are the earning and the cash. The earning is your revenue, and the cash is the asset you get. Many people think the cash is the revenue. Being able to point to where the revenue is on the BaSIS Board, separate from the cash, is a game changer. The power of BaSIS Board lies in this pointability that the concept map enables.

Anyone can use BaSIS Board in their work, life, teaching, personal and workplace financial conversations, meetings with their accountant, budget planning, and so on.

Download the free PDFs on this page and print them out letter size or poster size. You can use BaSIS Board in any way that conforms to the licensing below.

We encourage you to try it and discover for yourself how it can enhance your financial conversations. In our experience, it gets under your skin and you’ll start envisaging all financial information in the layout of the concept map. For example, you’ll start picturing assets in green at the top left of your mind’s eye and revenue at the bottom right, in orange.

You may not charge for your use of BaSIS Board. It is licensed to you under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, also known as CC BY-NC-SA. You can share copy and redistribute BaSIS Board in any medium or format and you can also adapt and build upon the BaSIS Board, if you give attribution to the Wealthvox (the developer of BaSIS Board), provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may not use BaSIS Board for commercial purposes. And if you build upon the BaSIS Board, you must distribute your work under the same CC BY-NC-SA license.