Vijay S. Sampath

Financial statement fraud, commonly referred to as "cooking the books," involves deliberately overstating assets, revenues, and profits and/or understating liabilities, expenses, and losses. When a forensic accountant investigates business financial fraud, she looks for red flags or accounting warning signs that indicate suspect business accounting practices.

Most of the time, forensic accounting is used when someone commits fraud. For this reason, forensic accountants are often referred to as fraud investigators or fraud examiners. Fraud takes many forms, but no matter how you look at it, fraud is theft; it is profiting by deceit or trickery and involves the theft of funds or information or the use of someone's assets without permission.

The Limited Liability Company or LLC is an alternative type of business entity. A Limited Liability Company or LLC is like a corporation regarding limited liability, and it’s like a partnership regarding the flexibility of dividing profit among the owners. An LLC can elect to be treated either as a partnership or as a corporation for federal income tax purposes.

Two methods are available to prepare a statement of cash flows: the indirect and direct methods. The Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) prefers the direct method, while many businesses prefer the indirect method. Regardless of which method you use, the bottom-line cash balance is the same, and it has to equal the amount of cash you show on the balance sheet.

A good way to do some ratio and trend analysis work is to prepare both horizontal and vertical analyses of the income statement. Both analyses involve comparing income statement accounts to each other in dollars and in percentages. Understanding horizontal and vertical analysis is essential for managerial accounting, because these types of analyses are useful to internal users of the financial statements (such as company management), as well as to external users.

A budget is a financial plan that includes both financial and non-financial information. Its most obvious features are revenue and expense projections — how much you anticipate earning and spending. The budget can also contain non-financial information, such as how many employees you think you need. A budget is a forecasting document, but businesses also use it as a financial control tool to monitor activities in their business.

Whether you’re starting a new business, launching a new division or a new product line, or simply preparing for the future, you need to develop a strategic plan — your business’s road map to the future. The plan reminds you, your employees, and third parties what you do, how you do it, the customers you do it for, and maybe even how you’ll do it in a superior way.

In many ways, the present value process is the same as the concepts used for notes payable. Assume a company issues a $100,000 bond due in four years paying seven percent interest annually at year-end. Here are the steps to compute the present value of the bond: Compute annual interest expense. The interest expense is $100,000 x 0.

You can begin drafting the business plan after the business’s executive management teams or new company founders have decided that the concept for the new business endeavor has merit (which is by no means a small task). You can prepare a draft by following four simple steps: Delve into historical business information.