Definition of General Accounting
Miscellanea / / July 04, 2021
By Javier Navarro, in Dec. 2016
Any company or entity needs to incorporate a system of accounting to take all the control over the set of economic and financial activities. In this sense, everything that has a dimension economic in a company has an accounting impact.
Ideas and Basic Principles of General Accounting
Accounting reports on the current situation of a company, its evolution annual or historical and forecasts for the future. In other words, companies are in permanent transformation and accounting is a tool to explain said change.
Accounting is aimed at anyone who maintains commercial or labor relations with the company, for For example, the management of the entity, employees, the state through the treasury and suppliers creditors.
For the information that is handled to be useful, it is necessary to use a unified system, also known as a general accounting plan. This plan especially affects the external relations of an entity, since each company has internal accounting, also known as analytical or cost accounting.
The main accounts of the general ledger
In a succinct way, we could say that there are four general groups of ledger accounts:
1) of assets,
2) profit and loss,
3) passive and
4 of heritage net
Among those that make up the first group are non-current asset accounts, that is, the set of items that a company has bought and that will be in the company for the long term (the main non-current asset is fixed assets, which can be intangible such as a patent or material such as machinery).
Also, there are the accounts of current active, which refers to what the company has bought with the aim of selling it in the short term, as well as cash such as that which is deposited in the Bank.
Profit and loss accounts refer to the income and expenses in the operation of a company
Expenses include personnel, rent, tax of companies, the purchase of material, the interests to face the credits requested from the banks or the electricity supply. Of course, profits refer to the sales of products or services.
Liability accounts refer to the set of debts that a business has to start new projects. Therefore, these accounts indicate the debts that are contracted with other people or entities.
Equity accounts refer to the money with which a company has started its business. economic activity, as well as the money that the company has been able to generate on its own.
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