A Quick Guide to Accounting Madison WI

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Even a relatively small business generates a surprisingly large number of transactions, and all transactions have to be recorded. Certain other events that have a financial impact on the business have to be recorded as well. These are called events because they’re not based on give-and-take bargaining — unlike the something-given-for-something-received nature of economic exchanges. Events such as the following have an economic impact on a business and are recorded:

A business may lose a lawsuit and be ordered to pay damages. The liability to pay the damages is recorded.

A business may suffer a flood loss that is uninsured. The waterlogged assets may have to be written down, meaning that the recorded values of the assets are reduced to zero if they no longer have any value to the business. For example, products that were being held for sale to customers (until they floated down the river) must be removed from the inventory asset account.

A business may decide to abandon a major product line and downsize its workforce, requiring that severance compensation be paid to the laid off employees.

At the end of the year the accountant makes a special survey to make sure that all events and developments during the year that should be recorded have been recorded, so that the financial statements and tax returns for the year are complete and correct.

Taking the Pulse of a Business: Financial Statements

I want to introduce you to the three primary kinds of financial statements so you know from the get-go what they are and why they’re so crucial.

Financial statements are prepared at the end of each accounting period. A period may be one month, one quarter (three calendar months), or one year.
Financial statements report summary amounts, or totals. Accountants seldom prepare a complete listing of the details of all the activities that took place during a period, or the individual items making up a total amount. Business managers occasionally need to search through a detailed list of all the specific transactions that make up a total amount. When they want to drill down into the details, they ask the accountant for the more detailed information. But this sort of detailed listing is not a financial statement.

Outside investors in a business see only summary-level financial statements.
For example, investors see the total amount of sales revenue for the period but not how much was sold to each and every customer.

One type of accounting report is a “Where do we stand at the end of the period?” type of report. This is called the statement of financial condition or, more commonly, the balance sheet. The date of preparation is given in the header, or title, above this financial statement.

A balance sheet shows two sides of the business, which I suppose you could think of as the financial yin and yang of the business:

Assets: On one side of the balance sheet the assets of the business are listed, which are the economic resources owned and being used in the business. The asset values reported in the balance sheet are the amounts recorded when the assets were originally acquired — although I should mention that an asset is written down below its historical cost when the asset has suffered a loss in value. (And to complicate matters, some assets are written up to their current fair values.) Some assets have been on the books only a few weeks or a few months, so their reported historical values are current. The values for other assets, on the other hand, are their costs when they were acquired many years ago.

Sources of assets: On the other side of the balance sheet is a breakdown of where the assets came from, or their sources. Assets are not like manna from the heavens. Assets come from two basically different sources: creditors and owners. First, the creditors: Businesses borrow money in the form of interest-bearing loans that have to be paid back at a later date, and they buy things on credit that are paid for later. So, part of total assets can be traced to creditors, which are the liabilities of a business. Second are the owners: Every business needs to have owners invest capital (usually money) in the business. Also, businesses retain part or all of the annual profits they make, and profit increases the total assets of the business. The total of invested capital and retained profit is called owners’ equity.

Suppose a business reports $2.5 million in total assets (without going into the details of which particular assets the business holds). I know that the total of its liabilities, plus the capital invested by its owners, plus its retained profit, adds up to $2.5 million. Otherwise its books would be out of balance, which means there are bookkeeping errors.

Continuing with this example, suppose that the total amount of the liabilities of the business is $1.0 million. This means that the total amount of owners’ equity in the business is $1.5 million, which equals total assets less total liabilities. Without more information we don’t know how much of total owners’ equity is traceable to capital invested by the owners in the business and how much is the result of profit retained in the business. But we do know that the total of these two sources of owners’ equity is $1.5 million.

A pop quiz
Here’s a teaser for you. If a business’s total assets equal $2.5 million and its total liabilities equal $1.0 million, we know that its total owners’ equity is $1.5 million. Question: Could the owners have invested more than $1.5 million in the business? Answer: Yes. One possibility is that the owners invested $2.5 million but the business has so far accumulated $1.0 million of losses instead of making profit. The accumulated loss offsets the amount invested, so the owners’ equity is only $1.5 million net of its cumulative loss of $1.0 million. The $1.0 million of cumulative loss is money down the rat hole. Owners bear the risk that the business may be unable to make a profit. A loss falls on the owners and, accordingly, causes a decrease in the owners’ equity amount reported in the balance sheet.

The financial condition of the business in this example is summarized in the following accounting equation (in millions):

$2.5 assets = $1.0 liabilities + $1.5 owners’ equity

Looking at the accounting equation, you can see why the statement of financial condition is called the balance sheet; the equal sign means the two sides balance.

Double-entry bookkeeping is based on the accounting equation — the fact that the total of assets on the one side is counterbalanced by the total of liabilities, invested capital, and retained profit on the other side. Basically, double-entry bookkeeping simply means that both sides of transactions are recorded. For example, if one asset goes up, another asset goes down — or, alternatively, either a liability or owners’ equity goes up. This is the economic nature of transactions. Double-entry means two sided, not that the transactions are recorded twice.

Other financial statements are different from the balance sheet in one important respect: They summarize the flows of activities over the period. (An example of a flow number is the total attendance at Colorado Rockies baseball games over its entire 82 home game regular season; the cumulative count of spectators passing through the turnstiles over the season is the flow.) Accountants prepare two types of financial flow reports for a business:

The income statement summarizes the inflow from sales revenue and income, which is offset by the outflows for the expense during the period. Deducting expenses from revenue and income leads down to the well-known bottom line, which is the final net profit or loss for the period and is called net income or net loss (or some variation of these terms). Alternative titles for this financial statement are the statement of operations and the statement of earnings. Inside a business, but not in its external financial reports, the income statement is commonly called the profit and loss statement, or P&L report.

The statement of cash flows summarizes the business’s cash inflows and outflows during the period. The accounting profession has adopted a three-way classification of cash flows for external financial reporting: cash flows from making sales and incurring expenses; cash flows from investing in assets and selling assets; and cash flows from raising capital from debt and equity sources, returning capital to these sources, and making distributions from profit to owners.

The three primary financial statements — balance sheet, income statement, and statement of cash flows — constitute the hard core of a financial report to those persons outside a business who need to stay informed about the business’s financial affairs. These individuals have invested capital in the business, or the business owes them money; therefore, they have a financial interest in how well the business is doing.

The managers of a business, to keep informed about what’s going on and the financial position of the business, also use these three key financial statements. They are absolutely essential in helping managers control the performance of a business, identify problems as they come up, and plan the future course of a business. Managers also need other information that is not reported in the three basic financial statements.

The three primary financial statements constitute a business’s financial center of gravity. The president and chief executive officer of a business (plus other top-level officers) are responsible for seeing that the financial statements are prepared according to applicable financial reporting standards and according to established accounting principles and methods.

If a business’s financial statements are later discovered to be seriously in error or deliberately misleading, the business and its top executives can be sued for damages suffered by lenders and investors who relied on the financial statements. For this reason, business managers should understand their responsibility for the financial statements and the accounting methods used to prepare the statements. In a court of law, they can’t plead ignorance.

I have met more than one business manager who doesn’t have a clue about his or her financial statements. This situation is a little scary; a manager who doesn’t understand financial statements is like an airplane pilot who doesn’t understand the instrument readouts in the cockpit. Such a manager could run the business and “land the plane safely,” but knowing how to read the vital signs along the way is much more prudent.

Business managers at all levels need to understand financial statements and the accounting methods used to prepare them. Also, lenders to a business, investors in a business, business lawyers, government regulators of business, entrepreneurs, anyone thinking of becoming an entrepreneur and starting a business, and, yes, even economists should know the basics of financial statement accounting. I’ve noticed that even experienced business journalists, who ought to know better, sometimes refer to the balance sheet when they’re talking about profit performance. The bottom line is found in the income statement, not the balance sheet!

Considering Accounting Careers

In our highly developed economy, many people make their living as accountants—and here I’m using the term accountant in the broadest possible sense. If you look in the Statistical Abstract of the United States you’ll see that upwards of 2 million people make their living as bookkeepers, accountants, and auditors. They work for businesses, government agencies, nonprofit organizations, and other organizations and associations.

Because accountants work with numbers and details, you hear references to accountants as bean counters, digit heads, number nerds, and other names I don’t dare mention here. Accountants take these snide references in stride and with good humor. Actually, accountants rank among the most respected professionals in many polls.

In the accounting profession, the mark of distinction is to be a CPA, which stands for certified public accountant. The term public means that the person has had some practical experience working for a CPA firm; it does not indicate whether that person is presently in public practice (as an individual CPA or as an employee or partner in a CPA firm that offers services to the public at large) rather than working for one organization. For example, I have a CPA certificate in Colorado, but I’m on inactive status because I have retired and do not offer my services to the public.

To become a CPA, you go to college, graduate with an accounting major in a five-year program (in most states), and pass the national, computer-based
CPA exam. You also must satisfy professional employment experience; this requirement varies from state to state but generally is one or two years. After satisfying the education, exam, and experience requirements, you get a CPA certificate to hang on your wall. More important, you get a permit from your state to practice as a CPA and offer your services to the public. States require continuing education hours to maintain an active CPA permit.

The top-level accounting officer in a business organization is usually called the controller. The controller designs the entire accounting system of the business and keeps it up-to-date with changes in the tax laws and changes in the accounting rules that govern reporting financial statements to outside lenders and owners. Controllers are responsible for hiring, training, evaluating, promoting, and sometimes firing the persons who hold the various bookkeeping and accounting positions in an organization — which range from payroll functions to the several different types of tax returns that have to be filed on time with different government agencies.

The controller is the lead person in the financial planning and budgeting process of the business organization. Furthermore, the controller designs the accounting reports that all the managers in the organization receive — from the sales and marketing managers to the purchasing and procurement managers. These internal reports should be designed to fit the authority and responsibility of each manager; they should provide information for managers’ decision-making analysis needs and the information they need to exercise effective control. The controller also designs and monitors the accounting reports that go to the business’s top-level vice presidents, the president, the chief executive officer, and the board of directors. All the tough accounting questions and problems get referred to the controller.

Smaller businesses may employ only one accountant. In many cases a small company’s full-time bookkeeper or office manager carries out many of the duties that would be done by the controller in a larger organization. Smaller businesses often call in a CPA for advice and help. The CPA may function more or less as a part-time controller for a small business, preparing its annual income tax returns and helping to prepare the business’s external financial reports.

State incorporation laws typically require that someone in the business be designated the treasurer, who has fiduciary responsibilities. Also, these laws usually require that someone be designated the secretary. The organizational charts of larger businesses usually put their controller under their vice president for finance, or chief financial officer (CFO). The accounting functions in a business are integrated with and work in close coordination with its financial, treasury, and secretary functions.

Many CPAs move on to other careers. A recent article in the Journal of
Accountancy featured former CPAs who moved on to other interesting careers. One became a Harley-Davidson dealer, another a high school teacher, another an auto racing track owner, another a physical fitness coaching business owner, and one even became a stand-up comedian whose stage name is “Debitman.” Serving time as a CPA is a good springboard to many careers, even being the author of Accounting For Dummies.

By the way, if you’re interested in accounting, you may think about getting a Ph.D. in accounting and becoming an accounting professor. After a few years in public accounting, I went back to school, got my Ph.D., and spent the rest of my career in that capacity. These days, the starting salaries for new assistant professors of accounting are well into six digits!

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For Dummies is a registered trademark of Wiley Publishing, Inc. in the United States and other countries. Used here by license.

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