What is accounting?

What is accounting?

Accounting is simply the measure, process and financial language of various organisations that perform financial transactions. An organisation in this reference is a legal entity from an economic standpoint. This 'entity' includes people who need to report their income and taxes, companies and organisations who provide products and services, trusts, non-profit organisations and so forth. I'll just refer to these entities as organisations for consistency.



Accounting itself is the representation of financial transactions that an organisation engages in and reports on to represent financial health. Accounting is a vast area that includes a number of similar yet distinct functions ranging from financial accounting, management accounting, tax accounting and audit or forensic accounting.

The basis of accounting is the recording of financial transactions, so that summaries of the financials may be presented in financial reports, is known as bookkeeping, of which double-entry bookkeeping is the most common system.

I endeavor to provide a view into how accounting works and learning workshops to identify how you can get accounting to work for you.