Читать книгу Financial Accounting For Dummies - Maire Loughran - Страница 12

Broadly speaking, accounting is the process of organizing facts and figures and relaying the result of that organization to any interested customers of the information. This process doesn’t just relate to numbers spit out by a computer software program; it pertains to any type of reconciliation.

Here’s an example from my own life of accounting that doesn’t involve numbers or money: A teenager slinks in after curfew, and his parent asks for a complete accounting of why he is late. When the teenager tells the facts, you have information (his car broke down in an area with no cell coverage), the individual producing the information (the mischievous teen), and the interested customer, also known as the user of the information (the worried parent).

The subject of this book, financial accounting, is a subset of accounting. Financial accounting involves the process of preparing financial statements for a business. (Not sure what financial statements are? No worries — you can find an overview of them in the next section.) Here are the key pieces of the financial accounting process:

 Information: Any accounting transactions taking place within the business during the accounting period. This includes generating revenue from the sales of company goods or services, paying business-related expenses, buying company assets, and incurring debt to run the company.

 Business entity: The company incurring the accounting transactions.

 Users: The persons or businesses that need to see the accounting transactions organized into financial statements to make educated decisions of their own. (More about these users in the “Getting to Know Financial Accounting Users” section of this chapter.)