A Practical Walk-Through for Using the Romero López Accounting Textbook
The Libro Contabilidad Javier Romero Lopez Cuarta Edicion is structured differently from most introductory accounting workbooks you will find in Spanish business schools. It does not lead with theory chapters before asking you to open Excel. It drops you into a running commercial case—typically a mid-sized trading company—and asks you to record entries, post to the ledger, and build trial balances as you go. That is useful. It is also where most people get stuck. Start by opening the chapter on the diario general. Do not skip the first three weeks of exercises even if the numbers look repetitive. The repetition is the point. Each transaction type appears in a slightly different context—one week you are dealing with VAT returns on purchases, the next it is supplier discounts, then later it is consignment inventory adjustments. If you treat each exercise as isolated, you will miss how the chart of accounts codes shift across modules. Here is the part nobody mentions: keep a side sheet mapping account 400-series subcodes to their corresponding fiscal documentation types. The book assumes you already know that a factura recibida maps to account 400 and a nota de crédito maps to 404, but when the exercises introduce international suppliers with intracommunity VAT, the mappings change and the book rarely flags it explicitly. I learned this the hard way during a semester project when my final trial balance was out of balance by exactly the amount of an intracommunity acquisition that had been posted to the wrong subaccount. Took me six hours to find because I was looking at the wrong column in the spreadsheet.
Work through the libro mayor section with actual T-accounts drawn out on paper before touching any digital tool. The Romero Lopez format expects you to understand the flow from diario to mayor to balance de comprobacion before you ever see automated posting. When you jump straight to Excel, you lose sight of which entries are still unposted and which have rolled into the trial balance. I kept a physical ledger folder for this. Each chapter got a divider. By the time we reached the cierre exercises, I could see at a glance where my postings had diverged from the expected balances. The cierre de ejercicios section is where the book shows its real value, and also where it is most frustrating. The closing entries for inventory adjustments under the Spanish PGC (Plan General de Contabilidad) require understanding both the mercantile method and the fiscal implications simultaneously. The book gives you the framework but does not always spell out why certain cuentas de pérdidas y ganancias get closed to 129 and others do not. I had to cross-reference with the official BOE PGC appendix to figure out which temporary accounts actually roll forward versus which hit retained earnings at year-end. If you are working through this alone without a professor to point out the gaps, pair the textbook with the official PGC glossary and the AEAT's guia del IVA. The book is excellent for mechanics. It is less thorough on the regulatory rationale behind each entry.
What the book handles well and where it falls short
The strength of the fourth edition is its progressive case study design. Each chapter builds on the previous one, and the transactions become incrementally more complex in a way that mirrors actual small-to-medium enterprise accounting. The solutions at the back of the book are generally accurate, though they sometimes use abbreviated account descriptions that can confuse someone who is still memorizing the full PGC account names. The weakness is in advanced topics. Depreciation schedules for amortization de activos fijos get only surface-level treatment. Consolidation entries are barely mentioned. If your course requires knowledge of NIIF / IFRS convergence topics or group accounting, this book will not carry you there. You will need a supplementary text or a university module that goes beyond the PGC basics. Another practical limitation: the Excel templates the book references are tied to specific spreadsheet layouts. If your instructor uses a different format or you are adapting the work for actual business use, you will spend time reformatting rather than learning accounting. Not a fatal issue, but it adds friction.
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I still recommend it as a primary workbook for introductory Spanish-language accounting courses. It is one of the few texts that makes you actually do the posting work instead of just reading about it. Just don't treat it as a complete reference. Keep the PGC and AEAT guides open on a second screen. And for the love of it, draw those T-accounts by hand at least once before you trust a spreadsheet to do the work for you.
