View:
Sorted by:
Mind the GAAP: U.S. Accounting and Financial Reporting Standards
In the United States, business accountants must follow specific rules — called Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) — when reporting business financials. The Generally Accepted Accounting Principles [more…]
Looking at International Accounting and Reporting Standards
The International Accounting Standards Board, or IASB, based in London, is the main authoritative accounting standards setter outside the United States. [more…]
Accounting and Reporting by Government and Not-For-Profit Entities
Accounting and financial reporting standards have evolved and been established for U.S. government and not-for-profit entities. Financial reporting by government and not-for-profit entities is a broad [more…]
Things to Remember about Budget Analysis
A budget truly gives a business owner or manager a way to plan out the year's operation, think about what's most important, and quantify what the firm should achieve over the year. While formulating your [more…]
Understanding Activity Ratios in Bookkeeping
Activity ratios provide an indication of how efficiently a firm runs its operations. For example, all other factors being equal, a firm that keeps a very modest amount of inventory is in better shape than [more…]
Understanding Profitability Ratios in Bookkeeping
The profitability ratios analyze a firm's profitability. In a sense, these profitability ratios are the most important ratios that you can calculate. They typically provide terribly useful insights into [more…]
Understanding Traditional Overhead Allocation on an Income Statement
The problem in many businesses using traditional overhead allocation is that their overhead expenses or operating expenses don't cleanly tie to products or services. Without good allocation of overhead [more…]
Understanding Activity-Based Costing
To create an activity-based costing (ABC) product line income statement, you attempt to trace the overhead cost directly to products or services. For example, suppose that in the case of an imaginary hot [more…]
Should You Use Activity-Based Costing in a Small Business?
Activity-based costing (ABC) lets you better allocate overhead costs and, as an added bonus, also often gives you unique insights into what "drives" your overhead costs. With this information in hand, [more…]
How to Implement a Simple Activity-Based Costing System
Activity-based costing (ABC) systems don't have to be that complicated, particularly if you just want better allocation of your overhead costs rather than a system to look at the cost drivers or the activities [more…]
Understanding Liquidity Ratios in Bookkeeping
Liquidity ratios measure how easily and comfortably a firm can pay its immediate financial obligations and exploit immediate short-term financial opportunities. For example, everything else being equal [more…]
Understanding Leverage Ratios in Bookkeeping
Leverage ratios measure how much debt a firm carries and how easily a firm pays the interest expenses of carrying that debt. Leverage ratios are important for an obvious reason. Typically, a firm mostly [more…]
How to Use Economic Value Added When Your Business Has Debt
In very large businesses, economic value added (EVA) analysis gets really computationally burdensome. Although there are multiple potential problems, you should be familiar with one common complication [more…]
How to Calculate the Rate of Return on Capital
Capital budgeting boils down to the idea that you should look at capital investments (machinery, vehicles, real estate, entire businesses, yard art, and so on) just as you look at the CDs [more…]
Thinking about Risk with Capital Investments
Risk is an issue even with simple investments like bank CDs. But with capital investments, no government agency is looking out for your interest and picking up the pieces if things do a Humpty Dumpty and [more…]
How Profit-Volume-Cost Analysis Works
Profit-volume-cost analysis is a powerful tool that estimates how a business's profits change as the sales volumes change as well as breakeven points. [more…]
Calculate Breakeven Points in Your Business
Profit-volume-cost analysis is a powerful tool that estimates how a business's profits change as the sales volumes change. It can also help estimate the breakeven point. A [more…]
Finding Market Equilibrium Price and Quantity
Buyers and sellers interact in markets. Market equilibrium occurs when the desires of buyers and sellers align exactly so that neither group has reason to change its behavior. The market equilibrium price [more…]
Identifying Market Failures
Sometimes markets fail to generate the socially optimal output level of goods and services. Several prerequisites must be fulfilled before perfect competition can work properly and generate that output [more…]
Financial Formulas
Formulas are an important part of business. A formula qualifies as such when it consistently gives you correct results and answers to questions thus providing organization and structure. The most common [more…]
Common Business and Financial Acronyms
The business world is packed with terms and acronyms. Take a look through the following list, learn the terms, and you’ll be speaking like a financial pro in no time. [more…]
How to Keep Tabs on Your Business Cash
Cash is the lifeblood of any business, whether it’s a multi-billion dollar empire or a tiny independent company. Refer to these handy bullets when delegating the handling of cash within your business to [more…]
The Key Terms of Profit and Cash Flow Analysis
Understanding the terminology used in profit and cash flow analysis is essential to managing the finances of your business. Here are some key terms you should commit to memory: [more…]
Types of Cash Accounts for Your Business
The cash you use to run your business resides in different accounts. To manage your cash flows effectively, you generally need to have cash in the following types of accounts: [more…]
The Relationship between Cash Flow and Profit in Business
Making profit generates cash flow. Any business owner knows that. But the actual increase in cash during a given period is invariably lower or higher than the profit number. The following points illustrate [more…]
