A lot of businesses use accounting practices because it is a requirement by tax law. Also, companies can use the rules of tax law to their advantage financially. Accounting also has laws of conduct for the profession, and one extremely important one is ethics.
It determines if something is right or wrong, based on moral decisions.
If a business decides to use false or misleading advertising, or to bribe customers into giving them testimonials for a specific product, then they could be acting in an unethical manner.
Professional ethics is the guidelines that apply to the conduct of individuals of a certain profession.
Like the ethical actions of a company, the ethical action of an individual is a decision.
It is important for individuals who decide to become an accountant to have the highest levels of professionalism as possible.
When working with people, the accountant must act with integrity, display objectivity, and remain independent.
A company’s financial position indicates the number of resources that they have, and the claims against those precious resources at any time.
Claims can also be referred as equities.
So, a company can be known as a combination of economic resources and equities.
No matter what type of business you are in, every type of company has two different types of equities.
They are creditor’s equity and owner’s equity.
When using accounting language, the economic resources a company has at a particular time is called their assets.
On the other hand, the amount of creditor’s equity a company has is known as their liabilities.
Similar to an algebraic equation, both sides of the equation has to be equal.
This equation comes in handy when analyzing the financial effects of your everyday business activities.
Assets are known as the economic resources that a business has that are expected to generate money for them in the future.
Some examples are real estate and any other property that a business own so that they can rent out to people.
If a business is owed money than it goes into what is known as accounts receivable which are monetary items.
However, there are some assets that are not physical.
Some examples are copyrights, trademarks, and patents, and they are extremely valuable to a business.
Liabilities are the obligations that a business has such as paying cash, provide future services to individuals, or transferring assets to another entity.
These are the debt of a business or the money that they must owe soon.
All of these are recorded in the accounts payable.
Having a lot of debt is not fun and liabilities are claims that are seen by the law.
The law gives a creditor the right to push the sale of a company’s assets if they don’t pay their debt on time.
Creditors have a ton of rights over owners, and they must be paid in full even before the owners receive anything.
It is very possible for a debt to consume up all a company’s resources.
Owner’s equity refers to the claim that owners of a business make regarding the assets they have.
It is the residual interest or the remaining assets of a company after deducting the amount of entity liabilities.
The owner’s equity within a particular corporation is referred as stockholders’ equity.
The stockholders’ equity has two distinct parts which are the contributed capital and retained earnings.
The amount that an individual stockholder puts into a business is known as the contributed capital.
Contributed capital is usually divided into two separate parts known as “par value” and “additional paid in capital”.
The retained earnings are the amount of equity that is earned by stockholders from the income generating activities of a business that are kept for future uses by a business.