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Merchandising business accounting is often considered one of the most confusing topics for high school students. In a single chapter, students encounter purchases, returns, discounts, freight, inventory, and cost of goods sold, often before they fully understand service business accounting. This community service program aimed to help eleventh-grade students at SMA Kristen Yusuf understand how a merchandising business records its transactions, from buying goods to calculating gross profit. The program was held on-site and combined a short lecture, a case study of a fictional shop called "Toko Abadi Sejahtera", small-group exercises guided by university students, and an open discussion. The study measured students' understanding with a pre-test and post-test and observed their participation throughout the session. The average post-test score was higher than the pre-test score, with the clearest improvement in calculating cost of goods sold and gross profit. Students found the material easier to follow when transactions were presented as the story of a running shop rather than as a list of accounts. The distinction between periodic and perpetual inventory systems, however, remained the most challenging part. These results suggest that short, practice-based training built around everyday business examples can support classroom accounting lessons, and that follow-up sessions should give more time to perpetual inventory recording.
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Viriany et al. (2026) studied this question.
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