Accountancy

Accountancy
Accountancy is the process of communicating financial information about a business entity to users such as shareholders and managers. The communication is generally in the form of financial statements that show in money terms the economic resources under the control of management; the art lies in selecting the information that is relevant to the user and is reliable. The principlesof accountancy are applied to business entities in three divisions of practical art, named accounting, bookkeeping, and auditing.
Accountancy is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) as "the profession or duties of an accountant".
Accounting is defined by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) as "the art of recording, classifying, and summarizing in asignificant manner and in terms of money, transactions and events which are, in part at least, of financial character, and interpreting the results thereof.
Accounting is thousands of years old; the earliest accounting records, which date back more than 7,000 years, were found in Mesopotamia (Assyrians). The people of that time relied on primitive accounting methods to record the growth of crops and herds.Early accounts served mainly to assist the memory of the businessperson and the audience for the account was the proprietor or record keeper alone. Cruder forms of accounting were inadequate for the problems created by a business entity involving multiple investors, so double-entry bookkeeping first emerged in northern Italy in the 14th century, where trading ventures began to require morecapital than a single individual was able to invest. The development of joint stock companies created wider audiences for accounts, as investors without firsthand knowledge of their operations relied on accounts to provide the requisite information. This development resulted in a split of accounting systems for internal (i.e. management accounting) and external (i.e. financial accounting) purposes,and subsequently also in accounting and disclosure regulations and a growing need for independent attestation of external accounts by auditors.
Today, accounting is called "the language of business" because it is the vehicle for reporting financial information about a business entity to many different groups of people. Accounting that concentrates on reporting to people inside the business entityis called management accounting and is used to provide information to employees, managers, owner-managers and auditors. Management accounting is concerned primarily with providing a basis for making management or operating decisions. Accounting that provides information to people outside the business entity is called financial accounting and provides information to present and potentialshareholders, creditors such as banks or vendors, financial analysts, economists, and government agencies. Because these users have different needs, the presentation of financial accounts is very structured and subject to many more rules than management accounting. The body of rules that governs financial accounting in a given jurisdiction is called Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, or GAAP. Otherrules include International Financial Reporting Standards, or IFRS, or US GAAP.
Theory
The basic accounting equation is assets = liabilities + stockholders' equity. This is the balance sheet. The foundation for the balance sheet begins with the income statement, which is revenues - expenses = net income or net loss. This is followed by the retained earnings statement, which is beginning retainedearnings + net income - dividends = ending retained earnings or beginning retained earnings - net loss - dividends = ending retained earnings. The current ratio is current assets divided by current liabilities. The debt to total assets ratio is total assets divided by total liabilities.
Etymology
The word "Accountant" is derived from the French word Compter, which took its origin from the...