Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Peluang usaha



Metode pencatatan

Types of Accounting
The two methods of tracking your accounting records are:
• Cash Based Accounting
• Accrual Method of Accounting

Cash Based Accounting
Most of us use the cash method to keep track of our personal financial activities. The cash method recognizes revenue when payment is received, and recognizes expenses when cash is paid out. For example, your personal checkbook record is based on the cash method. Expenses are recorded when cash is paid out and revenue is recorded when cash or check deposits are received.

Accrual Accounting
The accrual method of accounting requires that revenue be recognized and assigned to the accounting period in which it is earned. Similarly, expenses must be recognized and assigned to the accounting period in which they are incurred.
A Company tracks the summary of the accounting activity in time intervals called Accounting periods. These periods are usually a month long. It is also common for a company to create an annual statement of records. This annual period is also called a Fiscal or an Accounting Year.
The accrual method relies on the principle of matching revenues and expenses. This principle says that the expenses for a period, which are the costs of doing business to earn income, should be compared to the revenues for the period, which are the income earned as the result of those expenses. In other words, the expenses for the period should accurately match up with the costs of producing revenue for the period.
In general, there are two types of adjustments that need to be made at the end of the accounting period. The first type of adjustment arises when more expense or revenue has been recorded than was actually incurred or earned during the accounting period. An example of this might be the pre-payment of a 2-year insurance premium, say, for $2000. The actual insurance expense for the year would be only $1000. Therefore, an adjusting entry at the end of the accounting period is necessary to show the correct amount of insurance expense for that period.
Similarly, there may be revenue that was received but not actually earned during the accounting period. For example, the business may have been paid for services that will not actually be provided or earned until the next year. In this case, an adjusting entry at the end of the accounting period is made to defer, that is, to postpone, the recognition of revenue to the period it is actually earned.
Although many companies use the accrual method of accounting, some small businesses prefer the cash basis. The accrual method generates tax obligations before the cash has been collected. This benefits the Government because the IRS gets its tax money sooner.

Pengertian akuntansi

Accountancy is the art of communicating financial information about a business entity to users such as shareholders and managers.[1] The communication is generally in the financial´s form 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.[2]

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.[3]

Accounting is defined by the AICPA as "The art of recording, classifying, and summarizing in a significant manner and in terms of money, transactions and events which are, in part at least, of financial character, and interpreting the results thereof."[4]

Accounting is thousands of years old; the earliest accounting records, which date back more than 7,000 years, were found in the Middle East. The people of that time relied on primitive accounting methods to record the growth of crops and herds. Accounting evolved, improving over the years and advancing as business advanced.[5]

Early accounts served mainly to assist the memory of the businessperson and the audience for the account was the proprietor or record keeper alone. Cruder forms of accounting were inadequate for the problems created by a business entity involving multiple investors, so double-entry bookkeeping first emerged in northern Italy in the 14th century, where trading ventures began to require more capital than a single individual was able to invest. The development of joint stock companies created wider audiences for accounts, as investors without firsthand knowledge of their operations relied on accounts to provide the requisite information.[6] This development resulted in a split of accounting systems for internal (i.e. management accounting) and external (i.e. financial accounting) purposes, and subsequently also in accounting and disclosure regulations and a growing need for independent attestation of external accounts by auditors.[7]

Today, accounting is called "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, or GAAP.[8]

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accountancy