Accounting: Meaning and Important Concepts

Accounting has been hailed by many as the “language of business”. There are many quotations like “A pen is mightier than the sword but no match for the accountant” by Jonathan Glancey which tell us about the power and importance of accounting.

The text book definition of accounting states that it includes recording, summarizing, reporting and analyzing financial data. Let us try and understand the components of accounting to understand what it really means.

Recording

The primary function of accounting is to make records of all the transactions that the firm enters into. Recognizing what qualifies as a transaction and making a record of the same is called bookkeeping. Bookkeeping is narrower in scope than accounting and concerns only the recording part. For the purpose of recording, accountants maintain a set of books. Their procedures are very systematic. Nowadays, computers have been deployed to automatically account for transactions as they happen.

Summarizing

Recording for transactions creates raw data. Pages and pages of raw data are of little use to an organization for decision making. For this reason, accountants classify data into categories. These categories are defined in the chart of accounts. As and when transactions occur, two things happen, firstly an individual record is made and secondly the summary record is updated.

For instance a sale to Mr. X for Rs 100 would appear as:

Sale to Mr. X for Rs 100
Increase the total sales (summary) from 500 to 600

Reporting

Management is answerable to the investors about the company’s state of affairs. The owners need to be periodically updated about the operations that are being financed with their money. For this reason, there are periodic reports which are sent to them. Usually the frequency of these reports is quarterly and there is one annual report which summarizes the performance of all four quarters. Reporting is usually done in the form of financial statements. These financial statements are regulated by government bodies to ensure that there is no misleading financial reporting.

Analyzing

Lastly, accounting entails conducting an analysis of the results. After results have been summarized and reported, meaningful conclusions need to be drawn. Management must find out its positive and negative points. Accounting helps in doing so by means of comparison. It is common practice to compare profits, cash, sales, assets, etc with each other to analyze the performance of the business.

History of Accounting:

One can never really understand a subject, unless they know where it came from. Therefore, a short history of the subject of accounting may be of interest to students of accounting. Here is a very brief history of how accounting evolved:

Single Entry Accounting System

Accounting is as old as financial transactions themselves. As soon as credit was invented, humans began to use accounting to simplify their lives. As expected, the oldest system of accounting used single entry accounting. This is the most intuitive form of accounting but is also incomplete. Records have been found on clay tablets in ancient Mesopotamia that show the existence of single entry accounting in that time.
Bahi-Khata System

Prior to rise of European commerce in the Medieval Ages, India was the primary center for bustling trade and commercial activity. Although there has been no record of this fact, but is claimed that Indian merchants had very advanced accounting systems at that time. These systems were called the Bahi Khata system. It is rumored that the westerners designed the double entry system based on the principles of Bahi Khata system but once again there is no conclusive proof.
Merchants of Venice

The birthplace of modern day accounting is Venice. In the Medieval Ages, Venice was a center of trade and commercial activity. Merchants had giant businesses and they were struggling to run these corporations efficiently. It is then that Luca Pacioli developed the double entry accounting system. There is still debate about whether he developed it or just improved it and made it available to the merchants. However, debate or no debate, Luca Pacioli is considered to be the “Father of Modern Day Accounting”.
Chartered Corporations

In the era of colonialism, chartered corporations were common. The government would approve certain companies and give them exclusive rights to trade with certain colonies. Citizens were encouraged to invest in such companies. Shares of a few such companies had paid rich dividends and hence it was common to invest in such companies.

However, the performance of such companies had to be reported to the shareholders on a periodic basis. Therefore accounting systems were further developed. They were now providing information to external shareholders apart from providing information to internal management.
Modern Accounting

The chartered companies have long gone. The world is now a free market. But information still needs to be provided to the external shareholders about the conduct of operations. Accounting, therefore has been further developed and is highly regulated in most countries.

Objectives of Accounting

Every activity that a business firm does must be done for a reason and accounting is no exception. Accounting helps the company achieve a myriad of objectives. Here is the list of objectives that accounting helps the company to obtain.

Permanent Record

Any business firm needs a permanent record of the transactions that it indulges in. These records could be required for internal purpose, for taxation purpose or for any other purpose. Accounting serves this function. Whenever the organization commits any resource of monetary value either within the firm or outside the firm, a record is made. This permanent record is held on for years and can be retrieved as and when need be.
Measurement of Outcome

A business firm may indulge in numerous transactions every day. It may make profit in some of these transactions while it may make losses in some other transactions. However, the effect of all these transactions needs to be aggregated over a period of time. There must be daily, weekly and monthly reports which provides information to the organization about how well it is performing its activities. Accounting serves this purpose by providing periodic financial statements which help the firm adjust their operations accordingly.
Creditworthiness

Firms need resources for their functioning. They do not have any capital stock at hand and need to obtain them from investors. Investors will give money to the firm only if they have reasonable assurance that the firm will be able to generate enough profit. Past accounting records help a great deal in proving this. All kinds of investors from banks to shareholders ask for past accounting details before they trust the management with their money.
Efficient Use of Resources

Firms can also conduct useful internal analysis with the help of accounting data. Accounting records tell the firm what resources were committed to what activity and what time. These records also summarize the return that was obtained from these activities. Management can then analyze past behavior and draw lessons about how they could have performed better and used resources more efficiently.
Projections

Accounting helps management and investors look forward. Costs and revenue growths can be projected after substantial data has been accumulated. The assumption made is that the company is likely to behave exactly as it has done in the past. Thus, analysts can make reasonable assumptions about the future based on the past record.

Limitations of Accounting

Although accounting may be heralded as being the language of the business, it is definitely not error free. This has been highlighted by the fact that accounting scams have occurred one after the other for many years. In fact, even after stricter regulation and tightening of accounting rules, accounting scams just don’t cease to stop.

As a student and practitioner of accounting, it is therefore imperative to know the limitations of accounting. Knowledge of limitations helps to factor them in and work with them. Here are the major limitations of accounting.

Subjective Measurement

Accountants have to attach a monetary value to every event or transaction that has taken place within the organization. Sometimes the monetary value of the transaction is impossible to be ascertained. Consider the case of depreciation. Accountants can at best provide estimates of the depreciation that should have taken place given the scale of operations. However, these estimates are usually way off the mark. This makes accounting policies open to debate as well as manipulation.
Qualitative Factors

Accountants try to attach a monetary value to everything. The things they cannot attach a monetary value to are not accounted for! Consider the case of goodwill. Until the organization has explicitly paid for the goodwill it purchased from another company, it cannot account for goodwill. According to accountants, the goodwill generated by the firm internally is worthless. We all know that this is not the case and therefore accounting is flawed as far as goodwill is concerned.
Unstable Unit of Account

Accountants have to measure all transactions in a single unit of account. This unit of account is usually the currency that is being used in a particular country. However, it is common knowledge that the value of currencies is not stable. Inflation, deflation and such other forces make currency values dynamic. When accountants express assets purchased in last year’s rupees with the same unit as purchased by this year’s rupees, it presents a distorted image. Many companies have low book values because their assets were purchased a long time back during periods of no inflation.
No Information about Opportunity Cost

Accountants provide information about what has happened. However, management would be better off if they had information about what could have happened if they used their resources in the optimum manner. This feature is also lacking in accountancy making its usefulness limited from the managerial point of view.