Accounting
What Is Accounting?
Accounting is the process of recording financial transactions pertaining to a business. The accounting process includes summarizing, analyzing, and reporting these transactions to oversight agencies, regulators, and tax collection entities. The financial statements used in accounting are a concise summary of financial transactions over an accounting period, summarizing a company’s operations, financial position, and cash flows.
Key Takeaways
- Regardless of the size of a business, accounting is a necessary function for decision making, cost planning, and measurement of economic performance.
- A bookkeeper can handle basic accounting needs, but a Certified Public Accountant (CPA) should be utilized for larger or more advanced accounting tasks.
- Two important types of accounting for businesses are managerial accounting and cost accounting. Managerial accounting helps management teams make business decisions, while cost accounting helps business owners decide how much a product should cost.
- Professional accountants follow a set of standards known as the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) when preparing financial statements.
- Accounting is an important function of strategic planning, external compliance, fundraising, and operations management.
How Accounting Works
Accounting is one of the key functions of almost any business. It may be handled by a bookkeeper or an accountant at a small firm, or by sizable finance departments with dozens of employees at larger companies. The reports generated by various streams of accounting, such as cost accounting and managerial accounting, are invaluable in helping management make informed business decisions.
The financial statements that summarize a large company’s operations, financial position, and cash flows over a particular period are concise and consolidated reports based on thousands of individual financial transactions. As a result, all professional accounting designations are the culmination of years of study and rigorous examinations combined with a minimum number of years of practical accounting experience
Types of Accounting
Accountants may be tasked with recording specific transactions or working with specific sets of information. For this reason, there are several broad groups that most accountants can be grouped into.
Financial Accounting
Financial accounting refers to the processes used to generate interim and annual financial statements. The results of all financial transactions that occur during an accounting period are summarized in the balance sheet, income statement, and cash flow statement. The financial statements of most companies are audited annually by an external CPA firm.
For some, such as publicly-traded companies, audits are a legal requirement.6 However, lenders also typically require the results of an external audit annually as part of their debt covenants. Therefore, most companies will have annual audits for one reason or another.
Managerial Accounting
Managerial accounting uses much of the same data as financial accounting, but it organizes and utilizes information in different ways. Namely, in managerial accounting, an accountant generates monthly or quarterly reports that a business’s management team can use to make decisions about how the business operates. Managerial accounting also encompasses many other facets of accounting, including budgeting, forecasting, and various financial analysis tools. Essentially, any information that may be useful to management falls under this umbrella.
Cost Accounting
Just as managerial accounting helps businesses make decisions about management, cost accounting helps businesses make decisions about costing. Essentially, cost accounting considers all of the costs related to producing a product. Analysts, managers, business owners, and accountants use this information to determine what their products should cost. In cost accounting, money is cast as an economic factor in production, whereas in financial accounting, money is considered to be a measure of a company’s economic performance.
Tax Accounting
While financial accountants often use one set of rules to report the financial position of a company, tax accountants often use a different set of rules. These rules are set at the federal, state, or local level based on what return is being filed. Tax accounts balance compliance with reporting rules while also attempting to minimize a company’s tax liability through thoughtful strategic decision-making. A tax accountant often oversees the entire tax process of a company: the strategic creation of the organization chart, the operations, the compliance, the reporting, and the remittance of tax liability.
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