What is Bookkeeping?

June 23, 2010 by Rachel Banks
Filed under: Uncategorized 

Bookkeeping is the recordkeeping of the money values of the transactions of a business. Bookkeeping grants the numbers from which accounts are prepared but is a distinct process, preliminary to accounting.

Basically, bookkeeping finds two types of information: (1) the current value, or equity, of an enterprise and (2) the change in value—profit or loss—taking place in the entity within a singular time period.

Management officials, investors, and credit grantors all need to have such information: management so as to understand the results of operations, to control costs, to budget for the future, and to make financial policy decisions; investors in order to understand the upshot of business operations and make decisions regarding buying, holding, and selling securities; and credit grantors in order to assess the financial statements of a business in finding whether to give a loan.

Bits and pieces of financial and numerical recordkeeping can be found for just about every group of people with a commercial background. Records of trade contracts were found in the ruins of Babylon, and accounts for both farms and estates had been archived in ancient Greece and Rome. The dual-entry process of bookkeeping came with the progression of the entrepeneurial republics of Italy, and tutorial books for bookkeeping were created during the 15th century in many Italian cities.

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

The development of manufacturing, trading, shipping, and subsidiary services made correct financial books a must-have. The past of bookkeeping, in fact, closely reflects the past of commerce, industry, and government and, in part, assisted forming it. The international spread of industrial and commercial activity required greater cosmopolitan decision-making procedures, which in its turn called for better sophistication in the selection, classification, and presentation of information, increasingly with the assistance of computers. Taxation and government legislature became more important and resulted in higher requirement for information; business firms had to have available information to list with their income tax, payroll tax, sales tax, and other tax reports. Governmental agencies and educational and other nonprofit institutions also became sizeable, and the requirement for bookkeeping for their own inner operations became higher.

Though bookkeeping processes can be extremely complex, all of it is based on two types of books utilised in the bookkeeping procedure—journals and ledgers. A journal contains the daily transactions (sales, purchases, and so on), and the ledger has the information of individual accounts. The daily records from the journals are put in the ledgers.

Each month, as a general rule, an income statement and a balance sheet are made from the trial balance posted out of the ledger. The purpose of the income statement or profit-and-loss statement is to give an analysis of any changes that happen in the business equity resulting from the transactions of the period. The balance sheet gives the financial condition of the company at any particular point 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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