Looking for a post on a topic for intro financial or intro managerial? There’s now a Gemini notebook for that.

After 13+ years of posting to this blog, there are close to 400 posts. That is good news if you are looking for something on inventory. It is less good news if you are trying to find the right one on a Tuesday night for a Wednesday class.

So I built a companion for the archive. It is a Gemini Notebook (Google’s tool, formerly called NotebookLM) that has read every post on this blog, including the discussion questions. You can ask it for what you need in plain language.

Open the Accounting in the Headlines Gemini Notebook

Instead of searching for a keyword and hoping, describe the teaching situation:

• “I have ten minutes at the start of class. Find a short activity about fraud.”
• “Find an inventory post for students who have just learned FIFO and LIFO.”
• “Which posts involve professional judgment rather than calculation?”
• “Find activities that work for an asynchronous online discussion.”
• “Give me three posts about cash flows and tell me how they differ.”

It usually comes back with two or three options and explains how they differ, so you can pick rather than take the first thing it found. For each one it tells you the concepts involved, the likely course and level, roughly how long it takes, and whether anything in the post may need checking before you use it.

It will also help you plan the discussion. Ask about a particular post and it will lay out what students should recognize, what they usually get wrong, where the conversation can go, and what to ask next.

One thing it will not do is give out answers. Many of the questions here are written to produce discussion and judgment rather than a single correct response, and I don’t distribute answer keys. The notebook does not have them and will say so if you ask. It offers teaching guidance instead, which I think is the more useful thing anyway.

A caution worth stating plainly: roughly half of these posts were written before 2017. The accounting usually still holds. But the company figures are from the year of the post, and some of those companies have since been bought or taken private. The notebook flags the age of a post and tells you when to verify. It has not checked anything against current conditions.

It’s free. If you are prompted to sign in, a personal Google account is enough. I add new posts to the notebook every month or so, so the newest post on the blog may take a few weeks to show up there.

There is also a permanent Find a post page linked in the menu at the top of the site, so you can get back to the notebook later without hunting for this post.

This is a first attempt and I expect it needs adjusting. If it recommends something odd, misses something you would have expected, or says anything that does not match what a post actually says, please let me know in the comments.