The Basic Principals And Personal Accounting Reviews

Accounting has been defined as (by Professor of Accounting at the University of Michigan William) a pattern of having one basic function: "facilitating the administration of economic activity. This function has two closely related phases: 1) measuring and arraying economic data; and 2) communicating the results of this process to interested parties."

Much of accounting though is also concerned with basic bookkeeping. This is the process that records every transaction; every bill paid, every dime owed, every dollar and cent spent and accumulated.


Owners of a company, which can be individual owners or millions of shareholders, are most concerned with the summaries of these transactions, contained in the financial statement. The financial statement summarizes a company's assets. A value of an asset is what it cost when it was first acquired. The financial statement also records what the sources of the assets were. Some assets are in the form of loans that have to be paid back. Profits are also an asset of the business.

Personal accounting

If you have a checking account, of course you balance it periodically to account for any differences between what's in your statement and what you wrote down for checks and deposits. Many people do it once a month when their statement is mailed to them, but with the advent of online banking, you can do it daily if you're the sort whose banking tends to get away from them.

You need to discover if you've made any errors in your recordkeeping or if the bank has made any errors. Another form of accounting that we all dread is the filing of annual federal income tax returns. Many people use a CPA to do their returns; others do it themselves. Most forms include the following items:

Personal exemptions - this is a certain amount of income that is excused from tax, and taxable income - This is the balance of income that's subject to taxes after personal exemptions and deductions are factored in. So you should understand all the basic meanings of certain terms in accounting.

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