What is Bookkeeping?
Bookkeeping is the recording of the money values of the function of a business. Bookkeeping grants the information from which accounts are written but is a different process, preliminary to accounting.
Basically, bookkeeping grants two areas of information: (1) the current value, or equity, of a business and (2) the change in value—profit or loss—taking position in the business within a particular time.
Management officials, investors, and credit grantors all have to have this information: management to assess the results of operations, to control costs, to budget for the future, and to make financial policy decisions; investors so as to assess the outcomes of business operations and make decisions for buying, holding, and selling securities; and credit grantors so as to analyze the financial statements of an enterprise in judging whether to allow a loan.
Bits and pieces of financial and numerical recordkeeping can be uncovered for almost every nation with a commercial background. Records of trade contracts have been uncovered in the archaelogy of Babylon, and accounts for both farms and estates were made in ancient Greece and Rome. The dual-entry process of bookkeeping began with the progression of the entrepeneurial republics of Italy, and tutorial manuals for bookkeeping were developed in the 15th century in some Italian cities.
In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the Industrial Revolution gave a significant stimulus to accounting and bookkeeping.
The rise of manufacturing, trading, shipping, and subsidiary services made factual financial books a paramount factor. The ancestry of bookkeeping, in fact, reflects the past of commerce, industry, and government and, in part, assisted in shaping it. The worldwide market of industrial and commercial activity required higher sophisticated decision-making methodology, which then required greater sophistication in the selection, classification, and presentation of information, increasingly with the assistance of computers. Taxation and government legislature became more detailed and resulted in even greater 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 developed in size, and the need for bookkeeping for their own operations became higher.
While bookkeeping methods can be rather multifaceted, all are based on two styles of books employed in the bookkeeping process—journals and ledgers. A journal has the daily transactions (sales, purchases, and such), and the ledger contains the record of individual accounts. The daily records from the journals are put in the ledgers.
At the end of each month, generally, an income statement and a balance sheet are prepared from the trial balance posted in the ledger. The point of the income statement or profit-and-loss statement is to display an analysis of those changes that have occurred in the entity equity due to the operations of the period. The balance sheet shows the financial condition of the corporation at a particular point in time in terms of assets, liabilities, and the ownership equity.
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