Business Accountant

BUSINESS ACCOUNTANT

Accounting and finance lie at the heart of business. It is possible to survive, for a while at least, without an effective marketing plan, poor human resource management and indeed a poorly designed business strategy. However, if there are serious faults with the management and control of the business’s financial systems, it will fail. On the positive side, good accounting and financial management helps keep the business under control; it also provides the owners, management and others with the information and the confidence to make the bold decisions and take the opportunities to help the enterprise grow. So for every business operation, accounting and finance must be a priority.

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. Accountancy is a branch of mathematical science that is useful in discovering the causes of success and failure in business. The principles of accountancy are applied to business entities in three divisions of practical art, named accounting, bookkeeping, and auditing.

Accounting is thousands of years old; the earliest accounting records, which date back more than 7,000 years ago, were found in Mesopotamia (the Assyrians). The people of that time relied on primitive accounting methods to record the growth of crops and herds. Today, accounting has become "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 entity is 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 potential shareholders, 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 is called Generally Accepted Accounting Principles ["GAAP"].