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USERS of Financial Information

The users of financial statements include present and potential investors, employees, lenders, suppliers and other trade creditors, customers, governments and their agencies and the public. They use financial statements in order to satisfy some of their different needs for information. These needs include the following: (a) Investors. The providers of risk capital and their advisers are concerned with the risk inherent in, and return provided by, their investments. They need information to help them determine whether they should buy, hold or sell. Shareholders are also interested in information which enables them to assess the ability of the enterprise to pay dividends. (b) Employees. Employees and their representative groups are interested in information about the stability and profitability of their employers. They are also interested in information which enables them to assess the ability of the enterprise to provide remuneration, retirement benefits and employment opportunities. (c) Lenders. Lenders are interested in information that enables them to determine whether their loans, and the interest attaching to them, will be paid when due. (d) Suppliers and other trade creditors. Suppliers and other creditors are interested in information that enables them to determine whether amounts owing to them will be paid when due. Trade creditors are likely to be interested in an enterprise over a shorter period than lenders unless they are dependent upon the continuation of the enterprise as a major customer. (e) Customers. Customers have an interest in information about the continuance of an enterprise, especially when they have a long-term involvement with, or are dependent on, the enterprise. (f) Governments and their agencies. Governments and their agencies are interested in the allocation of resources and, therefore, the activities of enterprises. They also require information in order to regulate the activities of enterprises, determine taxation policies and as the basis for national income and similar statistics. (g) Public. Enterprises affect members of the public in a variety of ways. For example, enterprises may make a substantial contribution to the local economy in many ways including the number of people they employ and their patronage of local suppliers. Financial statements may assist the public by providing information about the trends and recent developments in the prosperity of the enterprise and the range of its activities.

Accounting Information Types


Government Accounting:
Non-commercial accounting in which budgets and encumbrances form parts of the accounts, and assets are restricted for specified purposes. Called Public Finance Accounting in UK.

Management/Managerial Accounting:
Process of preparing management accounts that provide accurate and timely key financial and statistical information required by managers to make day-today and term decisions. Unlike financial accounting (which produces annual mainly for external stakeholders such as creditors, investors, and lenders) management accounting generates monthly or weekly reports for the firm's internal audiences such as department managers and the chief executive officer. These reports typically show the amount of available cash, sales revenue generated, amount of orders in hand, state of accounts payable and accounts receivable, outstanding debts, raw material and in-process inventory, and may also include trend charts, variance analysis, and other statistics. Also called managerial accounting.

Tax Accounting:
The method of accounting that focuses on tax issues; this includes all activities related to filing tax returns and planning for future tax obligations. US tax accounting was established by Title 26 of the Internal Revenue Code.
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Tax accounting is accounting for tax purposes. In the United States, tax accounting is governed by the Internal Revenue Code (IRC). The basic rules and regulations of tax accounting are dictated by Section 446 of the IRC. The main principles of Section 446 in the IRC stress consistency in tax accounting, mentioning applied financial accounting to come up with the appropriate method. Taxpayers must determine their tax-accounting technique by using their financial accounting technique as a point of reference.

Cost Accounting:
In management accounting, cost accounting establishes budget and actual cost of operations, processes, departments or product and the

analysis of variances, profitability or social use of funds. Managers use cost accounting to support decision-making to cut a company's costs and improve profitability. As a form of management accounting, cost accounting need not to follow standards such as GAAP, because its primary use is for internal managers, rather than outside users, and what to compute is instead decided pragmatically. Costs are measured in units of nominal currency by convention. Cost accounting can be viewed as translating the supply chain (the series of events in the production process that, in concert, result in a product) into financial values.

Financial Accounting:
Financial accountancy (or financial accounting) is the field of accountancy concerned with the preparation of financial statements for decision makers, such as stockholders, suppliers, banks, employees, government agencies, owners, and other stakeholders. Financial capital maintenance can be measured in either nominal monetary units or units of constant purchasing power.[1] The fundamental need for financial accounting is to reduce principalagent problem by measuring and monitoring agents' performance and reporting the results to interested users. Financial accountancy is used to prepare accounting information for people outside the organization or not involved in the day to day running of the company. Accounting provides accounting information to help managers make decisions to manage the business. In short, Financial Accounting is the process of summarizing financial data taken from an organization's accounting records and publishing in the form of annual (or more frequent) reports for the benefit of people outside the organization.

Auditing:
Audits are performed to ascertain the validity and reliability of information; also to provide an assessment of a system's internal control. The goal of an audit is to express an opinion on the person / organization / system (etc.) in question, under evaluation based on work done on a test basis. Due to practical constraints, an audit seeks to provide only reasonable assurance that the statements are free from material error. Hence, statistical sampling is often adopted in audits. In the case of financial audits, a set of

financial statements are said to be true and fair when they are free of material misstatements - a concept influenced by both quantitative (numerical) and qualitative factors. Auditing is a vital part of accounting. Traditionally, audits were mainly associated with gaining information about financial systems and the financial records of a company or a business (see financial audit). However, recent auditing has begun to include non-financial subject areas, such as safety, security, information systems performance, and environmental concerns. With nonprofit organizations and government agencies, there has been an increasing need for performance audits, examining their success in satisfying mission objectives. As a result, there are now audit professionals who specialize in security audits, information systems audits, and environmental audits.

System Accounting:
The system accounting utility allows you to collect and report on individual and group use of various system resources. The accounting system utility allows you to collect and report on individual, group, and Workload Manager (WLM) class use of various system resources. This accounting information can be used to bill users for the system resources they utilize, and to monitor selected aspects of the system operation. To assist with billing, the accounting system provides the resource-usage totals defined by members of the adm group, and, if the chargefeecommand is included, factors in the billing fee. The accounting system also provides data to assess the adequacy of current resource assignments, set resource limits and quotas, forecast future needs, and order supplies for printers and other devices. The following information should help you understand how to implement the accounting utility in your system. Accounting data reports After the various types of accounting data are collected, the records are processed and converted into reports. Accounting commands The accounting commands function several different ways. Accounting files The two main accounting directories are the /usr/sbin/acct directory, where all the C language programs and shell procedures needed to run the

accounting system are stored, and the /var/admdirectory, which contains the data, report and summary files. Administering system accounting There are multiple tasks you can complete for system accounting. These tasks include setting up an accounting system, showing CPU usage, and displaying accounting processes. Collecting accounting data Once you have setup system accounting you will want to start collecting and processing the different type of accounting data. Troubleshooting system accounting Use these troubleshooting methods to tackle some of the basic problems that may occur when using system accounting. If the troubleshooting information does not address your problem, contact your service representative.

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