Principles Of Accounting Principles

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Principles of Accounting Accounting is the recording of financial transactions plus storing, sorting, retrieving, summarizing, and presenting the information in various reports and analyses. All accounting or book keeping has a standard set of accounting principles. It stands for every type of business. In this way there is unity in all business accounting procedures to ensure that there is unity and a clear understanding no matter what business is being monitored. This system is called GAAP or Generally Accepted Accounting Principles and are general rules that all businesses follow when recording their financial information. There is no law enforcing this, but it is to the advantage of a business to use this when reporting to the different …show more content…

This is the concept that, once you adopt an accounting principle or method, you should continue to use it until a demonstrably better principle or method comes along. Not following the consistency principle means that a business could continually jump between different accounting treatments of its transactions that makes its long-term financial results extremely difficult to discern. Cost principle. This is the concept that a business should only record its assets, liabilities, and equity investments at their original purchase costs. This principle is becoming less valid, as a host of accounting standards are heading in the direction of adjusting assets and liabilities to their fair values. Economic entity principle. This is the concept that the transactions of a business should be kept separate from those of its owners and other businesses. This prevents intermingling of assets and liabilities among multiple entities, which can cause considerable difficulties when the financial statements of a fledgling business are first …show more content…

This is the concept that, when you record revenue, you should record all related expenses at the same time. Thus, you charge inventory to the cost of goods sold at the same time that you record revenue from the sale of those inventory items. This is a cornerstone of the accrual basis of accounting. The cash basis of accounting does not use the matching the principle. Materiality principle. This is the concept that you should record a transaction in the accounting records if not doing so might have altered the decision making process of someone reading the company's financial statements. This is quite a vague concept that is difficult to quantify, which has led some of the more picayune controllers to record even the smallest transactions. Monetary unit principle. This is the concept that a business should only record transactions that can be stated in terms of a unit of currency. Thus, it is easy enough to record the purchase of a fixed asset, since it was bought for a specific price, whereas the value of the quality control system of a business is not recorded. This concept keeps a business from engaging in an excessive level of estimation in deriving the value of its assets and

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