An Overview of Accountancy

What is accountancy? Accountancy is a specialist role designed to communicate financial information to the upper echelons of a particular business and generally follows specific guidelines, dependent on country, by generating monthly, quarterly and annual reports depicting the status of a company's assets and financial health.

The skill set associated with an accountant's role is apparent in the way the accountant presents the information gleaned from a financial audit and presents the findings in such a way that the relevant information can be accessed quickly by the reader, analysed, and applied to the reader's area of business effectively.

It is also a branch of mathematical science and is considered useful in determining the success or the failure of a business. The three main areas of accountancy as a whole can be broken down to bookkeeping, auditing and named accounting.

Essentially accounting is defined by the way in which financial information is recorded, classified and then interpreted and what the subsequent effects are thereof and the implications that can be ascertained from the data collated.

The information that is useful to a particular person or body must be presented in a way in which it can be accessed easily and will have sections that hold more weight for typically; creditors, banks, government bodies, financial analysts and economists.

Early accountancy records date back from many thousands of years with the earliest records being found some seven thousand years ago in the Middle East. The records show that these people used primitive accounting methods to analyse their crop cycles and the advancement or growth of their herds.

Obviously these methods have evolved greatly over the many years that have passed and complex solutions have been developed to deal with the huge changes in society and the subsequent global growth of business.

The majority of accountancy roles available today involve significant usage of computer aids and programs whereby complicated mathematics can be performed exceptionally easily and the margin for error can be lowered to some degree. There are many types of computer systems available to help with accounting and they vary from personal accounting, small business to larger companies and so on.

An Overview of Accountancy By Christopher Rymer