Читать книгу Accounting For Dummies - John A. Tracy - Страница 26

We devote a good deal of space in this book to explaining financial statements. In Chapter 2, we explain the fundamental information components of financial statements, and then Part 2 gets into the nitty-gritty details. Here, we simply want to introduce you to the primary kinds of financial statements so you know from the get-go what they are and why they’re so crucial.

Financial statements are prepared at the end of each accounting period. A period may be one month, one quarter (three calendar months), or one year. Financial statements report summary amounts, or totals. Accountants seldom prepare a complete listing of the details of all the activities that took place during a period or the individual items making up a total amount. Business managers may need to search through a detailed list of all the specific transactions that make up a total amount, and when they want to drill down into the details, they ask the accountant for the more detailed information. But this sort of detailed listing is not a financial statement — although it may be very useful to managers.

The outside, nonmanager investors in a business receive summary-level financial statements. For example, investors see the total amount of sales revenue for the period but not how much was sold to each and every customer. Financial statements are based on the assumption that you, the reader, are not a manager of the business (see the earlier section “Recognizing users of accounting information”). The managers of the business should make good use of their financial statements, but they also need more detailed information beyond what’s in the business’s financial statements.