Category: Accounting

The act of preparation of financial statements, reports, tax documents required by businesses and individuals in their dealings with the IRS, SEC and local and state authorities. Some statements included might be profit and loss, interim statement and balance sheets. Most accounting is done in accordance with GAAP (generally acceptable accounting principles)

You’ve Heard Of a Corporation What Exactly is it?


Most businesses start out as a small company, owned by one person or by a partnership. The most common type of business when there are multiple owners is a corporation. The law sees a corporation as a real, live person. Like an adult, a corporation is treated as a distinct and independent individual who has rights and responsibilities.

A corporation’s “birth certificate” is the legal form (filing certificate) that is filed with the Secretary of State of the state in which the corporation is created, or incorporated. It must have a legal name, just like a person. A corporation is separate from its owners and it is responsible for its own debts. The bank can’t come after the stockholders if a corporation goes bankrupt.

A corporation issues ownership shares to persons who invest money in the business. These ownership shares are documented by stock certificates, which state the name of the owner and how many shares are owned. The corporation has to keep a register, or list, of how many shares each share holder owns. Owners of a corporation are called stockholders because they own shares of stock issued by the corporation.

One share of stock is one unit of ownership; how much one share is worth depends on the total number of shares that the business issues. The more shares a business issues, the smaller the percentage of total owners’ equity each share represents.

Stock shares come in different classes of stock. Preferred stockholders are promised a certain amount of cash dividends each year. Common stockholders have the most risk. If a corporation ends up in financial trouble, it’s required to pay off its liabilities first. If any money is left over, then that money goes first to the preferred stockholders. If anything is left over after that, then that money is distributed to the common stockholders.

 

Making Your Accounting Principles Acceptable




It would be very easy for an employee to expect fair treatment from professionals within the company s/he’s employed with. To expect them to act within the precepts of the Golden Rule: “Do Unto Others as You Would Have Them do Unto You” which, if company management were to engage in such honorable behavior, workers would have little or nothing to worry about. But that’s not the case and therefore principles and systems must be employed.

If everyone involved in the process of accounting followed their own system, or no system at all, there would be no way to truly tell whether a company was profitable or not. Most companies follow what is commonly referred to as GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles), and there are huge tomes in libraries and bookstores devoted to just this one topic.

Unless a company states otherwise, anyone reading a financial statement can make the assumption that company has used GAAP. If GAAP is not the set of principles used for preparing financial statements, then a business needs to make clear which other form of accounting they have used and are bound to avoid using titles in its financial statements that could mislead the person examining it.

GAAP is the gold standard for preparing financial statements and/or a financial report. Not disclosing that it has used principles other than GAAP makes a company legally liable for any misleading or misunderstood data. These principles have been fine-tuned over decades and have effectively governed accounting methods and the financial reporting systems of businesses.

Different principles have been established for different types of business entities, such as for-profit and NFP (Not For Profit) companies/organizations, governments and other enterprises. GAAP is not cut and dried, however. They’re guidelines and, as such, are often open to interpretation. Estimates have to be made at times, and they require good faith efforts towards accuracy.

You have probably heard the phrase “creative accounting,” which is when a company pushes the envelope a little (or a lot) too far to make their business look more profitable than it might actually be. This is also known as massaging the numbers, a practice that can spiral out of control and quickly turn into accounting fraud (or cooking the books). The results of these practices can be devastating and ruinous to hundreds and thousands of lives, as in the cases of Enron, Rite Aid and others.