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Accounting is to be understood as reporting required by law. The accounting regulation on which this article is based follows the HGB. However, other accounting regulations are also fulfilled with the bookkeeping in Germany (for example IFRS and US-GAAP). This then requires parallel accounting from which several financial statements (according to the different accounting regulations) can be prepared.

It is expedient to subdivide the generic term "accounting" into the Financial accounting, from which annual financial statements (balance sheet, profit and loss account) are developed, and

the company accounts, which are used for internal cost recording and cost accounting (price calculation).

Bookkeeping is a component of business accounting. In addition to financial and operational accounting, this includes business statistics and comparative accounting as well as planning accounting (estimates for future income and expenditure).

Accounting" is often used as a synonym for "bookkeeping". This does not seem appropriate, since

the term "accounting" is mostly used in laws,

in practice, "accounting" is often understood to mean only the organisational unit of a company in which bookkeeping is carried out.

This article explains financial accounting and in particular the methodology of double-entry bookkeeping. This is the method of keeping proper books of account generally used in the private sector and required by law for merchants. Small traders and freelancers can account for their business according to the simpler revenue surplus statement.

Since the end of the 20th century, public administration has been supplementing cameralistic accounting with elements of the double-entry accounting method known in this field as Doppik. In Germany, the first pilot tests for the application of double-entry accounting systems at the municipal level took place in the 1990s. Since 1 January 2010 (entry into force), there has been a general legal basis for the application of double-entry accounting (Doppik) in the administrations of the Federation and the Länder (§ 49a HGrG) in the form of the amended Budget Principles Act (§ 1a, § 7a HGrG). The regional and local authorities were given the opportunity to independently organise the process of introducing other accounting systems in addition to cameralistics through their own legislation. The partially applied "state double-entry accounting" was subsequently supplemented with "municipal double-entry accounting". In this way, the basic rules of commercial accounting and balancing found their way into public budgeting and accounting. In the municipal sector, double-entry accounting led to a greatly changed structure of the budget statutes.