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Acc 280 Financial Statements Paper

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Financial Statements 1

Financial Statements
ACC 280
Emily Roddy

Financial Statements 2
Introduction
The purpose of this paper is to define accounting, and identify the four basic financial statements. The paper also explains how the different financial statements are interrelated to each other and why they are useful to managers, investors, creditors, and employees.
Accounting
Accounting is a business discipline that allows companies to record, analyze, and retrieve critical financial information that can be used to determine a company 's financial status. Its purpose is to help people understand what is going on financially within an organization provide reports and insights needed to make sound financial decisions. …show more content…

(Ohara, 2007) Most financial statements are made public for the benefit of stakeholders and potential investors. The bottom-line is that financial statements are the main source for analyzing how well a company is operating. The income (or profit and loss) statement is simply a report card of how much activity (revenue) was performed in the period, how profitable that activity was (gross profit/loss), and what it cost the contractor to run the business (overhead). (Murphy, 2006)
How Financial Statements are interrelated
Financial statements are interrelated. It is so because the financial position of a business changes after each session of good or bad financial performance. Until we measure both financial performance and position, we cannot predict the cash flow position of the business.
A change in one statement would affect the others. It is concluded the financial statements do have an interrelationship with each other and they must be understood with their interrelationship in order to be properly interpreted. The order should be to first the income statement, then the balance sheet, Retained Earnings Statement and finally the Statement of Cash Flows.

Financial Statements 5
Conclusion
Some individuals assume that the usefulness of financial statements is to predict the future of a business with data from the past. Sometimes this can be true in respect for trends that have continued for many years, for at least the near future. The fact is financial

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