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What Exactly is Accounting And Rules of Accounting

Posted on July 7, 2012 by admin
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Any individual who’s worked in an office at some point or one more has had to go to accounting. They are the people who pay and mail out the bills that keep the company running. They do a lot a lot more than that, though. Often referred to as “bean counters” they also keep their eye on profits, expenses and losses. Unless you’re running your personal enterprise and acting as your personal accountant, you’d have no way of understanding just how profitable - or not - your enterprise is without having some form of accounting. No matter what company you’re in, even if all you do is balance a checkbook, that’s still accounting. It is part of even a kid’s life. Saving an allowance, spending it all at as soon as - these are accounting principles.

Accounting is fundamentally details, and this information is published periodically in business as a profit and loss statement, or an income statement. Accounting is related with measuring and arraying economic information and communicating the outcomes of this approach to interested parties. What are some other companies exactly where accounting is critical? Properly, farmers need to follow cautious accounting procedures. Numerous of them run their farms year to year by taking loans to plant the crops. If it’s a superb year, a profitable one, then they are able to pay off their loan; if not, they may well need to carry the loan more than, and accrue much more interest charges.

Each enterprise and every individual needs to have some type of accounting technique in their lives. Otherwise, the finances can get away from them, they don’t know what they’ve spent, or whether or not they are able to expect a profit or a loss from their business. Staying on leading of accounting, regardless of whether it is for a multi-billion dollar organization or for a personal checking account is a necessary activity on a everyday basis if you are intelligent. Not doing so could mean whatever from a returned check or submitting a loss to a firm’s shareholders. Both circumstances may be similarly devastating.

Simple Accounting Rules

For example, a company’s accountants regularly look at the profit and loss for a month, a quarter or a fiscal year and submit these outcomes in a declaration of profit and loss that’s called an income statement. These statements contain elements including accounts receivable (what’s owed to the organization) and accounts payable (what the business owes). It may also get fairly difficult with subjects like retained earnings and accelerated depreciation. This in the higher stages of accounting and inside the corporation. A lot of accounting though, is also concerned with standard bookkeeping. This is the procedure that records every single transaction; each bill paid, every dime owed, every dollar and cent invested and accumulated.

But the founders of the organization, which can be individual people or large number of shareholders, are most concerned with the summaries of those transactions, contained within the economic statement. The financial statement summarizes a company’s assets. A value of an asset is what it expense when it was initial acquired. The monetary statement also records what the sources with the assets were. Some assets are within the type of loans that need to be returned. Income is also an asset of the enterprise.

Posted in Accounting | Tagged Accounting, Accounting Company, Accounting Principles, Accounting Procedures, Bean Counters, Checkbook, Checking Account, Crops, Dollar Organization, Economic Information, Everyday Basis, Exactly, Farmers, Income Statement, Interest Charges, Interested Parties, Necessary Activity, Personal Accountant, Personal Enterprise, Profit And Loss, Profit And Loss Statement, Rules, Submitt | Leave a reply

Accounting for Construction Contracts

Posted on October 10, 2011 by admin
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A contract is a big job requiring considerable length of time to complete and comprising activities to be done outside the factory promises, viz. construction of a dam or school building, laying down railway lines, etc. Special cost and financial accounting is required to maintain the records of construction contracts. Since each contract involves considerable resources both in terms of men and materials, it is necessary to devise an appropriate accounting system to ascertain the cost and profit made on each contract separately.

Profit on incomplete contracts: At the end of an accounting period it may be found that certain contract have been completed while others are still in process and will be completed in the coming years. The total profits made on completed contract say be safely taken to the credit of the profit and loss account. But the same cannot be done in case of incomplete contracts. These contracts are still in process, and there are possibilities of profits being turned into to losses on account of heavy rise in prices of materials and labor and losses on account of other unforeseen contingencies. At the same time it does not also seem desire able to consider the profits only on completed contracts and ignore completely incomplete ones because this may result in heavy fluctuations in the figure of profit from year to year. A year in which a large number of contracts have been completed will show an abnormal high figure for profit while reserve may be the case in the year in which a large number of contracts remain incomplete. Therefore, profits on incomplete contracts should be considered, of course, after providing adequate sums for meeting unknown contingencies.

There are no hard and fast rules for the calculation of the figures for profit to be taken to the credit of profit and loss account. However, the following rules may be followed:

(a) Profit should be considered in respect of work certified only, work uncertified should always be valued at cost.

(b) No profit should be taken into consideration if the amount of work certified is less than 1/4 of the contract price because in such cases it is not possible to foresee the future clearly.

(c) If the amount of work certified is 1/4 or more but less than1/2 of the contract price, 1/3 of the profit disclosed, as reduced but the percentage of cash received from the contractee, should be taken to the profit and loss account. The balance should be allowed to remain as a reserve.

(d) If the amount of work certified is very much near completion, if possible the total cost of completing the contract should be estimated The estimated total profit on the contract then can be calculated by deducting the total estimated cost from the contract price. The profit and loss should be credited with that proportion of total estimated profit on cash basis, which the work certified bears to the total contract price.

(f) The whole of loss, if any, should be transferred to the profit and loss account.

Cost Plus Contracts: In certain contracts the contractee agrees to pay to the contractor the cost price (usually prime cost) of the work done on the contract plus an agreed percentage thereof by way of overhead expenses and profit. Such contracts are known as cost-plus contracts. The system of cost plus contract costing is employed in cases where it is very difficult for the contractor to quote the contract price because there has been no precedent which he may take as basis. It is also employed where the work to be done is not fixed at the time of placing order for the contract. The method is generally used where government happens to be the contractee. The method suffers from the following disadvantages:

There is no incentive to the contractor to eliminate waste and economies the cost of completing the contract. On the other hand, he is tempted to increase the cost because greater the cost, the greater will be his share of profit. In case of this system the amount of overheads recovered and profit made depends upon the value of materials used, which is subject to considerable price fluctuations. The agreed fixed percentage may, therefore, prove to be either too excessive or too low for covering overheads and profit.

Escalation Clause: Escalation clause is usually provided in the contract as a safeguard against any likely changes in the prices of utilization of material and labor. The clause provides that in case prices of items of raw materials, labor, etc. specified in the contract, change during the execution of the contract, beyond a specified limit over the price prevailing at the time of signing the agreement, the contract price will be suitably adjusted. The term of the contract specify the procedure for calculating such adjustment in order to avoid all future disputes. Thus, such a clause safeguards the interests of both the contractor and contractee in case of fluctuations in the price of materials and labor, etc.

Work in Progress: At the end of the accounting period a contract may still be in progress. The term work in progress refers to the work done so for in respect of the contract, which is still incomplete. It consists of the following:

(1) Working Certified: It refers to the work approved by the contractee. In case of contracts it is the useful practice for the contractor to get the work approved from time to time from the contractee. This is helpful to the contractor in two ways; first in case the contractee finds the work not up to specifications, he may ask the contractor to take corrective actions in time. Second, in contract accounts it is useful practice to have a system of progress payments, i.e., the contractee agrees to pay a certain percentage of the work certified (say, 80 or 90 percent). This is advantageous to the contractor since he gets immediate liquid funds.

(2) Work Uncertified: It refers to the work which has been done by the contractor but not so far approved by the contractee.

Work certified generally includes some profit element also while work uncertified is always valued at cost to the contractor.

Sub Contracts: The contractor may entrust some portion of the work to be done under the contract to a sub-contractor. Usually work of a specialized nature, i.e., steel work, special flooring, etc., is done by sub-contractors, who are responsible to the main contractor. The cost of such sub-contracts is a direct charge against the contract for which the work has been done.

Posted in Accounting | Tagged Accounting, Accounting System, Construction, Construction Contract, Construction Contracts, Contingencies, Contracts, Cost Accounting, Desire, Financial Accounting, Fluctuations, Incomplete Contracts, Job, Length Of Time, Losses, Possibilities, Profit And Loss, Profit And Loss Account, Profits, Railway Lines, Sums | Leave a reply

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