Bill Hanna, CPA, created Controller Lab, an online platform where you practice real accounting tasks at a fictional coffee company. You do bank reconciliations, payroll, month-end close, and other staff accountant work, get instant feedback on how each entry hits the financial statements, and earn a certificate listing the skills you proved.
Hey guys, I'm very excited to share with you something that I've been working on the entire summer of 2026, the Controller Lab. This is a place where you can learn and practice accounting in a real company environment. Let me show you what I'm talking about. So you get hired at this company, Bean and Bag Roasters, which is a coffee manufacturer. You get a background on the company and the business and how much money they've raised, and you are hired as a staff accountant. You get welcomed to the team by the controller who gives you a welcome video, and you get a breakdown of the team itself. You get to meet the controller, the CFO, and the other people who work on the finance function. Then you jump into the lectures and tasks. So you go in and you receive lectures from me, so you get to see me teaching you accounting, and then you receive tasks. So for example, this This is an email from Sarah Mitchell, the controller, letting you know that the January utility invoice has arrived. The amount is $450. The invoice is dated February 3rd, but the usage occurred in January. Please record the accrual for January 31st. Okay, great. Then you go ahead and book the accrual journal entry. So you go to the transaction date and book the right date, which is January 31st for the accrual. You record your debit, so debit is going to be to utilities expense, and your credit is going to be accrued expenses. You select that, the dollar amount as you said, as you've seen in the email, $450, and you can post it. If you're confused about any of these tasks, you can go ahead and click on Ask Billy right here, and if you're stuck, Billy's gonna give you a nudge. You can ask any question or just give me a stronger hint. You can get a stronger hint on the task, and then you submit it for grading. And you did it correctly. Beyond that, you can click on review effect on the books. So this comes with a full balance sheet, income statement, and statement of cash flow, and you can see the effects when you click review effect on the books. You get exactly the area of the financial statements that got affected. So utilities expense, and on the balance sheet, you get to see where accrued expenses landed. On the current liabilities. You will get a grade for completing each task. So when you look at your overall score, you're being scored here for completing these tasks. In this case, I have a 98% average, which is a high average. And you'll continue. So you'll get a categorized weekly bank feed. And these are transactions that happen in a real business environment. You'll get a bank reconciliation. So you'll get an actual bank statement and you'll go ahead and reconcile the bank statement and book the necessary journal entries. Again, exactly like how it happens in a real company environment. You'll go through 7 weeks. So your first week has the foundation, second week is accounts payable, payroll, inventory on COGS, accounts receivable, other day-to-day transactions, a month-end close. After you complete the 7 weeks, you will receive a certificate of completion that's going to list out all of the areas that we covered. So you covered accounting foundation, accounts payable and inventory, payroll, inventory on COGS, accounts receivable, day-to-day transactions, a month-end close. This shows that you, you have real skills in a real company environment. You will have access to Resume Rocketship. Resume Rocketship, what it does, it takes your program, your experience in this program, and you just click on Generate Resume Language. When you click on it, it's going to look into the tasks that you completed and grab language from it that you can directly copy and paste onto your resume to show that you've done actual work. Okay, so now it's completed. Here is some resume bullets that you can copy. So you can click on copy bullets, processed and coded vendor invoices from source documents to correct GL accounts and accounting periods, reconciled short shipments, all of the things that happen in a real company environment. And then it gives you some skills. You can copy them here. And the ControllerLab additions you may want to include as well in your resume. Beyond that, you can go ahead and tailor your resume to a job. So you can upload your resume and upload or paste the job description in this box here, and the app will go ahead and tailor your resume and give it to you in a finished format that you can download. It will give you the actual resume tailored exactly to the job that you're applying for and using the skills and your prior experiences. It will leave you prior experiences, but it will change the language to make it a perfect fit for the job description, adding any necessary skills that you learn here in the program. Beyond all of that, you'll get access to Interview Buddy. So Interview Buddy is one that is job-specific. So you have staff accountant, senior accountant, all the way up to controller. When you click on each one, you'll have a set of questions. Some are interview essentials, behavioral, or technical accounting. When you practice one of them— so for example, where do you see yourself in 5 years— you get to record your answer here, and then it will grade you on that answer, and it will give you some pointers on how to make that answer stronger. And then you can practice it again until you ace it. And the best thing is that you can try this for one week for free. Go ahead and try it for one week. If you want to continue with the program, you provide your credit card information and pay for it. If you don't want to continue, you've taken the one week for free. So I hope to see you in the program and keep on learning.
