Contabilidad

Bonifacio Sánchez Jiménez School
Aibonito, Puerto Rico

English class

Contabilidad

Introducction

La ocupación que escogi fue la contabilidad. La contabilidad es un trabajo que me llama la atención. La contabilidad conlleva mucho trabajo ya que es el encargado de informar a la gerencia el estado de la compañía, negocio, fabrica ect. La contabilidad me llamo la atención ya que mipapa trabaja como contable en una joyería en San Juan. Los dias en que no tenia clasesme iba con el al trabajo a ayudarlo y observar lo que asia. En mi casa mi papa ayuda al vecino que esta estudiando contabilidad y yo los observo mientras hacen los trabajos.

Why did you choose this occupation?

Yo escogí la ocupación ya que mi papa es contable y me gusta lo que él hace en el trabajo.Definition
A record of financial transactions for an asset orindividual, such as at a bank, brokerage, credit cardcompany, or retail store.

History

Long before document-shredding became headline news accountants found themselves under pressure to change.

Over the past two decades, innovations in computer technology rendered many of the old-fashioned auditor's functions obsolete,prodding accountants to find other ways to bring in revenue.

Companies' desire to produce ever-rosier results for an ever-larger and savvier shareholding public compelled accountants to find ways to put the best possible spin on clients' financial reports.

And then there was simple greed. The industry had already shown it was susceptible. In the early 1970s, a prominent accountant was linked to theWatergate scandal. The next decade, the savings-and-loan crisis raised questions about how accountants could have let things get so bad.

In recent years, partners' pay, largely determined by hourly billing rates, fell way behind that of accountants' investment-banking brethren, enriched by the rise of the stock-market culture of the '80s and '90s. Hiring consultants and having people selltheir services to audit clients was a way to narrow the gap.

And ultimately the ancient profession sacrificed the public confidence that underpinned its reputation.

The industry was formed as a vessel of trust, originating more than 10,000 years ago with stone counters in Jericho. In ancient Sumerian cities of the land that is now Iraq, bookkeepers documented wealth by pressing the ends ofsticks into damp clay tablets that hardened into permanent records.

Formal accounting was invented by a Franciscan friar named Luca Pacioli in 1494 in his paper "Summa de Arithmetica, Geometria, Proportioni et Proportionalita" ("Everything About Arithmetic, Geometry and Proportion").

The treatise described double-entry bookkeeping -- that for every credit entered into a ledger there must be adebit, a concept created by Florentine merchants and hailed by Goethe as "one of the most beautiful discoveries of the human spirit."

Three traits shared by successful merchants, Mr. Pacioli wrote, were access to cash, a constantly updated accounting system and a good bookkeeper. His contemporary Christopher Columbus apparently knew that: On his voyage to the New World, he took a royal accountantto track his "swindle sheet when he started to figure the cost of gold and spices he would accumulate," according to Alistair Cooke's 1973 book "America."

The craft changed little until the industrial revolution, when accounting advanced from pure recordkeeping to a means of survival. Josiah Wedgwood, Charles Darwin's grandfather, kept his British pottery factory alive during the depression of1772 through the innovation of cost accounting -- calculating the costs of materials and labor for each step of the manufacturing process, and then setting prices to ensure enough margin to remain viable.

By the mid-19th century, "accompants," as accountants were known, were flourishing in Britain. The Cooper brothers, whose name lives on in PriceWaterhouse Coopers, ran a Dickensian operation...