What is Bookkeeping?

June 23, 2010 by Mr McGoogle
Filed under: Uncategorized 

Bookkeeping is the recording of the money values of the operation of a business. Bookkeeping grants the figures from which accounts are made but is a distinct process, required prior to accounting.

Predominantly, bookkeeping records two parts of information: (1) the current value, or equity, of an entity and (2) the changes in value—profit or loss—taking place in the enterprise within a singular time.

Management officials, investors, and credit grantors all need this kind of information: management so as to assess the upshots of operations, to control costs, to budget for the future, and to make financial policy decisions; investors to assess the results of business operations and make decisions regarding buying, holding, and selling securities; and credit grantors so as to judge the financial statements of an entity in assessing whether to give a loan.

Traces of financial and numerical recordkeeping can be found for nearly every society with a commercial backbone. Records of trading contracts were uncovered in the archaelogy of Babylon, and accounts for both farms and estates had been held in ancient Greece and Rome. The double-entry method of bookkeeping came with the development of the commercial republics of Italy, and tutorials for bookkeeping were developed during the 15th century in many Italian cities.

During the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the Industrial Revolution provided a significant stimulus to accounting and bookkeeping.

The rise of manufacturing, trading, shipping, and subsidiary services made correct financial books a necessity. The ancestry of bookkeeping, in fact, resembles the ancestry of commerce, industry, and government and, in part, helped to form it. The worldwide spread of industrial and commercial activity demanded better sophisticate decision-making procedures, which itself required better sophistication in the selection, classification, and presentation of information, increasingly with the progression of computers. Taxation and government regulation became more important and resulted in increased requirement for information; business entities had to have available information to support their income tax, payroll tax, sales tax, and other tax reports. Governmental agencies and educational and other nonprofit institutions also grew, and the requirement for bookkeeping for their inner operations became larger.

While bookkeeping procedures can be very multifaceted, all are based on two styles of books utilised in the bookkeeping procedure—journals and ledgers. A journal contains the daily transactions (sales, purchases, and so on), and the ledger must have the record of individual accounts. The daily records kept in the journals are written in the ledgers.

Each month, by general practice, an income statement and a balance sheet are created from the trial balance posted out of the ledger. The duty of the income statement or profit-and-loss statement is to provide an analysis of those changes that have taken place in the ownership equity as a result of the operations of the period. The balance sheet gives the financial position of the business at the particular point in time taken from assets, liabilities, and the ownership equity.

For information about MYOB bookkeeping brisbane or MYOB training brisbane, contact Stone Consulting. Stone Consulting also does bookkeeping in Redlands.

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