Any company or entity needs to incorporate an accounting system to take full control over the set of economic and financial activities. In this sense, everything that has an economic dimension in a company has an accounting impact.
Ideas and Basic Principles of General Accounting
Accounting reports on the current situation of a company, its annual or historical evolution and forecasts for the future. In other words, companies are in permanent transformation and accounting is a tool to explain this change.
Accounting is aimed at anyone who maintains commercial or employment relationships with the company, for example, the management of the entity, employees, the state through the treasury and creditor suppliers.
For the information that is handled to be useful, it is necessary to use a unified system, also known as a general accounting plan. This plan especially affects the external relations of an entity, since each company has internal accounting, also known as analytical or cost accounting.
The main accounts of the general ledger
In a succinct way, we could say that there are four general groups of ledger accounts:
1) of assets,
2) profit and loss,
3) passive and
4) equity
Among those that make up the first group are non-current asset accounts, that is, the set of items that a company has bought and that will be in the company in the long term (the main non-current asset is fixed assets, which can be immaterial like a patent or material like machinery).
Also, there are current asset accounts, which refers to what the company has bought with the aim of selling it in the short term, as well as cash such as that which is deposited in the bank.
Profit and loss accounts refer to the income and expenses in the operation of a company
Expenses must include personnel, rent, corporation tax, purchase of material, interest to meet the loans requested from banks or electricity supply. Of course, profits refer to the sales of products or services.
Liability accounts refer to the set of debts that a business has to start new projects. Therefore, these accounts indicate the debts that are contracted with other people or entities.
Equity accounts refer to the money with which a company has started its economic activity, as well as the money that the company has been able to generate by itself.
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