Principles of Accounting

Author: Ouyang Aiping
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2002-02-01
Features: This book fully reflects and closely integrates China's current accounting standards and international practices. It takes the explanation of basic accounting principles as its foundation, overcoming the defects of previous textbooks where "principles" were not prominent and were repetitive with subsequent professional courses. This also ensures the content of the book has stability. Given that students are encountering accounting for the first time, the book emphasizes reasoning and incorporates examples to make the content more accessible to students. Each chapter begins with "Learning Objectives and Goals," and ends with "Chapter Summary" to help students quickly grasp the key points and difficulties of the material. Additionally, each chapter recommends post-reading materials related to the chapter content, encouraging students to read carefully and think actively to enrich the teaching material and improve learning outcomes. Chapter Introduction Learning Objectives and Goals As an introductory accounting course, this chapter primarily addresses three questions: What is accounting? Second, what can accounting do? Third, what are the methods of accounting. The goal of accounting is to provide information, with its being accounting reports. This book will elaborate on the basic theories of accounting and the basic methods of accounting based on accounting reports (primarily financial accounting reports). Thus, this chapter also serves as the starting point for the book, setting the objectives for subsequent chapters. Through learning, students should understand the goals of accounting, grasp what accounting reports are, and the corresponding accounting methods. In daily life, people often encounter problems such as: receiving 100 yuan today and spending 80 yuan, leaving 20 yuan; purchasing a batch of clothing for 50 yuan each this month, selling a portion at 60 yuan each, what is the profit or loss from the sold clothing this month, and what is the total cost of the unsold clothing at the end of the month; selling a batch of stocks today that were bought the day before yesterday—is it a profit or a loss; and so on. All the examples above involve calculations, which are simple accounting actions. Accounting initially involved the calculation and recording of human economic activities, such as ancient Chinese knotting and simple notations, which were the early stages of accounting. Moreover, early accounting was merely an adjunct to production functions, where people calculated and recorded income and expenses as an additional activity outside of production. With the development of social production and the increasing demands of economic management, accounting gradually separated from production functions to become an independent function, leading to the establishment of accounting departments and the accounting profession. Correspondingly, the content, methods, and other aspects of accounting underwent significant changes, and accounting technology also developed considerably. So, what exactly is accounting? What can accounting do? What is the content of accounting? What procedures and methods should accounting use to achieve its goals? What are the various accounting professions? These are all prerequisites and foundations for learning the subsequent chapters. As the beginning of the entire book, this chapter explains the above questions, hence the term "Introduction."