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Talk:Accounting/Archive 1

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Lincs geezer (talk | contribs) at 03:57, 6 December 2005 (→Accounting as a profession). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Latest comment: 19 years ago by Lincs geezer in topic Accounting as a profession

I'm not pleased with the redirecting of accounting, accountant and bookkeeping all to accountancy. First, accountancy is a kind of $20 word not in general use in English. Second, bookkeeping is a discrete occupation carried on by thousands of people who are not professional accountants. Third, accountants are a profession, and suitable for a professional topic of their own. As it is the article promises to become quite unwieldy and ultimately useless for providing simple information about bookkeeping, accounting and the profession of accounting. user:Fredbauder

Well Fred, it seems you are all wet. "Accountancy" is just British English, while "accounting" is merely American English. It would seem the British get to title at least one article their way. User:Fredbauder PS. We still need a bookkeeping article.
My Masters Degree from Stetson University in DeLand, Florida, USA says that I received a Masters in Accountancy. As such, I'm willing to go along with Accountancy, as long as any questions about Accounting get redirected to the proper page. I am far more concerned about the separate but related topics of auditing and accountancy being combined into one. Most accountants do not audit. --Fcoulter 19:09, 27 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Those don't fit in the article so let me put them here until we find appropriate places.

Bookkeeping and Accountancy


Accounting Education and Training See http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm

Accountancy and the Law

Accountancy vs. Fraud See http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/fraud.htm

Creative accounting is a phrase sometimes used as a joke, but basically it means the questionable use of clever innovations. Sometimes this simply produces results which are difficult to understand; sometimes it results in out and out fraud. Some consider the phrase "Accountancy as Fraud" more appropriate, and argue for more comprehensive accounting reform or the abolishment of the profession.

Accountancy and Taxation

Accounting complexity arises in part, perhaps in most part, from tax rules. Tax, tariff and trade laws typically imply changes also to accounting practices, to mirror capital asset value gains and losses.

I have removed:

RECENT EVENTS

Since 2002, the global step of reduction of costs and optimization of resources became a legal constraint, an obligation for all the highly-rated corporations or unquoted in the stock exchange.

Everything began with the law SARBANNES-OXLEY in the United States in 2002 who returned compulsory internal control. From 2003, Canada and European Economic Community took measures aiming at identical objectives:

1- The realization and optimization of the operations of reduction of costs and management of the performance;

2- The reliability of the financial information of costs and performances;

3- Correspondence to laws and to current regulations, notably standards of management of the quality;

4- The implementation of the rules of good governance “to play collective” :

-Every individual member of the company contributes to his level of responsibility in the internal control;

-The responsibilities of the staff of frame vary according to hierarchical levels;

- The general manager assures ultimate responsibility; he is responsible for the system of internal control;

-The directors of the various units are responsible for the internal control bound to the objectives of this one;

-The financial executives and their teams play a role of dominating piloting: they follow and analyze performances, by report not only in objectives bound to financial information, but also to those bound to the operations of the company and to the legal obligations.

These measures which impose the internal coherence as base of the management put company in front of a major technological challenge: the integration of their system of internal control.

Internal control directed towards “realization and optimization of the operations of reduction of costs and management of the performance" gets organized indeed around the notion of inductors of costs, the unforeseen phenomenon, the abnormality or the dysfunction which provokes an increase of costs. By opposition the inductor of activity is the event which activates the activity of the company.

To understand difficulty recovering, it is necessary remember yourself that the most known methods of management arise from the cost accounting which depends on the financial accounting itself. So very wide-spread methods such as the ABC (ACTIVITY-BASED COSTING), the ABM (ACTIVITY-BASED MANAGEMENT), “Cost killer””, etc., rest on the inductor of activity and not on the inductor of costs.

It is only very recently that multi-field searches in management drove to the normalization of the inductor of costs and to its standardization through the new technologies of information and the communication.

See :


It seems off-topic. Maybe it should go to cost management or corporate governance. mydogategodshat 06:37, 21 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Usage

I doubt that there is a significant number of people (American, British, etc.) who use "accountancy" instead of "accounting". Is the former word really so common? [[User:Poccil|Peter O. (Talk)]] 00:33, Sep 24, 2004 (UTC)

I don't know about British English, but the word "accountancy" is pretty much nonexistent in the US. Rhobite 00:09, Sep 25, 2004 (UTC)
I'm from the U.S., and I've never heard of the word "accountancy" until I saw this article. Also: "accountancy" gets 1,720,000 hits [1] on Google, while "accounting" gets 22,700,000 [2], about 13 times as many as the former. Please note, however, that it is our house style to generally not change between American and British English, but to rather to use the dialect in which the individual articles were written in. • Benc • 05:52, 25 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Having lived in Ireland and England, I can confirm that "accountancy" is in widespread and accepted use in the UK and Éire. I thus think this RfC is another incarnation of ye ole "Britspeak vs. Yankspeak" issue. I would personally MUCH prefer "accountancy", because to a British English speaker it carries a more professional connotation. However, I am biased pro-Britspeak and there is little merit in perpetuating this never-ending war of the words. I say either let's go with whatever notation the article first was written in, as Benc noted, or write separate but linked accountancy/accounting articles about the respective British/US practices/professions. Ropers 00:05, 27 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I agree with Ropers. Maurreen 15:21, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I've never heard of the term accountancy in my life, except for now, and I live in Canada. All the university courses here are called 'accounting'. --ShaunMacPherson 02:18, 12 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Australians also use "accounting". It seems the UK is alone on this one, which is strange, since usually the US is the one out on a limb. Shane King 03:33, Oct 26, 2004 (UTC)

Various countries also use different words for terms in accounting. I just saw Profit and loss account (British) which I know is called Income statement in US. I think we should distinguish those in future articles. --voidvector

My Masters Degree from Stetson University in DeLand, Florida, USA says that I received a Masters in Accountancy. As such, I'm willing to go along with Accountancy, as long as any questions about Accounting get redirected to the proper page. I am far more concerned about the separate but related topics of auditing and accountancy being combined into one. Most accountants do not audit. --Fcoulter 19:09, 27 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Accountancy → Accounting

A proposal to move Accountancy → Accounting was placed on wikipedia:requested moves and failed. The discussion follows:

This may well fail, and I apologize in advance if this move turns out to be ill-founded, but as I recall, the word "accounting" is many times more common than "accountancy". I want to know the usage of these two words. Peter O. (Talk) 22:30, Jan 30, 2005 (UTC)

  • Neutral. This seems to be a case of British English vs American English. I haven't heard of the term "Accountancy" but if I'm to assume the page is correct, accountancy is the british word, learn something new everyday! In that case, I'm leaning toward oppose, but I'll wait to see any other comments before I decide for sure. For a lot these of cases it'd be nice if articles could actually exist at two names instead of having a redirect (but look and be functionally identical, when editing it would note that you're editing all the articles under that title.) --Sketchee 22:55, Jan 30, 2005 (UTC)
  • Neutral They're synonyms, however the difference is nuanced. Accountancy: the occupation of maintaining and auditing records and preparing financial reports for a business. Accounting: The bookkeeping methods involved in making a financial record of business transactions and in the preparation of statements concerning the assets, liabilities, and operating results of a business. (i.e. a "method of accounting" or an "accounting system") It isn't a matter of British English vs. American English as was erroneously assumed by the author of the article, because accountancy appears in both British and American speech. It is just that accountancy is more archaic as the vogue of modern speech is using the gerund form to discuss activities or occupations i.e. accounting, or knitting (which used to be knittery until it was dropped out of the dictionary). As such, "accounting" has become used more and more as the name of the profession. Traditionally, professions ending in -ant like accountant (or an adjective like bouyant) were connected with disciplines ending in -ancy like accountancy (or bouyancy) chiefly because the suffix -ant meaning One that performs, promotes, or causes a specified action (as a noun) or Performing, promoting, or causing a specified action (as an adjective) because it derives from the Middle English (particularly the French influence) present participle forms of the verb are. —ExplorerCDT 00:13, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC)
  • Neutral. IMO Accountancy is the profession and Accounting is the methodology. Rd232 00:51, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC)
  • Support. Neutralitytalk 06:28, Jan 31, 2005 (UTC)
  • Oppose. Proteus (Talk) 08:21, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC)
  • Oppose. I'm married to an accountant. RD232 is right and I see no reason to move the article. Jooler 10:31, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC)
  • Support. First, the distinction does not exist in US English, as far as I have ever observed. The trade and the practice are both called ‘accounting’. (ExplorerCDT is arguing that we should put an article under an archaic term?) Second, the article is more about the practice than the trade, so even under the British/archaic distinction, this is an article about accounting, with accountancy as a subtopic. That is the way it should be: the practice is the primary topic. If we were starting from scratch, we would not define ‘accounting’ as “what accountants do” and then refer readers to ‘accountancy’. We would define ‘accountant’ as “practitioner of accounting” and then refer readers to ‘accounting’. Cooking is not “what cooks do”, and sewing is not “what tailors do”. Cooks and tailors are doing professionally something that the rest of us can do in small ways all the time. Accounting is the more general topic and this article is general, so the redirect is absolutely going the wrong way. — Ford 11:49, 2005 Jan 31 (UTC)
      • I'm so far neutral (though leaning to oppose the proposed move), because it's either we use a correct term (accountancy) of increasingly archaic usage, or an incorrect term (accounting) just because it's popular and increasingly prevalent. What's the old phrase of Woodrow Wilson? Something paraphrased about how what's right is not always popular, what's popular is not always right. There should—rather than redirect either to the other—be two separate articles.—ExplorerCDT 03:43, 2 Feb 2005 (UTC)
    • Ah... I didn't realise this was a 'pondinan' thing. If that's the case then the choice of BE rather than AE of the original author should be preserved. That is Wikipedia policy. Jooler 11:58, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC)
      • But it is simply not another matter of BE vs. AE. —ExplorerCDT 03:43, 2 Feb 2005 (UTC)
      • The convention to which you refer is an editing convention, not a naming convention. Where article titles are concerned, generic topics (that is, not specific to either Britain or America) should be hosted under neutral terms, when possible. This was never more clear than in the fiasco over gramophone record (né analogue disc record, a.k.a. LP a.k.a. vinyl record a.k.a. record (audio) a.k.a. ...). ADH (t&m) 13:19, Jan 31, 2005 (UTC)
        • Read Wikipedia:Naming conventions (use English), specifically the part that says "As a reminder, all national standards of English spelling are acceptable on the English-language Wikipedia, both for titles and content. American spellings need not be respelled to British standards nor vice-versa; for example, either Aeroplane or Airplane is acceptable." Proteus (Talk) 13:24, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC)
  • comment - some people have commented that they have never heard the term "Accountancy". If you check ".gov" sites using Google ([3]), thus restricting hits to the USA you get 28,000 hits mainly related to state regulators of the industry. Jooler
  • Strongly oppose As an accountant my work involves accountancy, but not much, if any, accounting. Indeed, I would be insulted if someone did say I just did accounting! It's like calling a mathematician an arithmetician. To those in the know there is a world of difference, jguk 12:40, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC)
  • ... if you're English, which jguk has equated with "in the know" a great many times in the past. I know several well-paid Washington accountants, and if you ask them what business they were in they invariably say "accounting." This is largely a pondian issue, as the article notes in its introductory paragraph, but the -ing usage is becoming more and more prevalent in even the most conservative British strongholds. More to the point, the more vulgar usage is far more likely to be searched for by the average reader, and more likely to be linked to by the average editor. Support. ADH (t&m) 12:57, Jan 31, 2005 (UTC)
  • Oppose. This isn't a British versus American, thing, and there is a concrete difference between the terms. Wiktionary might not be good enough to know the difference between the two, and instead think that this is an American/British thing. But the AHD is, and does. (I'm deliberately citing an American dictionary, to make the point more forcefully.) "accountancy" is an occupation; "accounting" is a method. The two are not even synonymous. An "account" can be a narrative or a record of events, and "accounting", as in "making an account of", can have nothing to do with "accountancy". Uncle G 13:30, 2005 Jan 31 (UTC)
  • Oppose. Philip Baird Shearer 13:33, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC)
  • Oppose. Guettarda 17:05, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC)
  • Oppose. Estel (talk) 17:46, Jan 31, 2005 (UTC)
  • Oppose. violet/riga (t) 17:42, 1 Feb 2005 (UTC)
  • Oppose. Accountancy is noun (concise); Accounting is ambiguous (either noun or verb. And as noted only one function of Accountancy). Daeron 06:46, 3 Feb 2005 (UTC)
  • Oppose. Berek 10:49, 3 Feb 2005 (UTC)
  • Oppose -- Francs2000 | Talk [[]] 19:46, 3 Feb 2005 (UTC)

According to critics ...

I don't see how the paragraph beginning "According to critics of standard accounting practices ..." follows from the previous paragraph. The criticism I've heard about accounting is whether financial measures are enough, historical cost, etc. I haven't seen any serious criticism of the double entry bookkeeping system which is what the placement of this paragraph implies.--Fredrik Coulter 00:35, Mar 1, 2005 (UTC)

Art of Science

The first paragraph of the history section (which I really like and know little about) starts off with "The art of accountancy on a scientific principle ..." This really bothers me. Art and science tend (for me) to not work well together. Is there any way of rewriting this so that it works better?--Fredrik Coulter 00:37, Mar 1, 2005 (UTC)

I don't agree that accounting is a science at all, better to stick with calling it an art. The technology associated with book keeping has not changed since Pacioli. Accounting is an assemblage of rules to deal with modern complexities (and is a compromise to keep the tax man mostly happy and to keep CEO's mostly out of jail).

The Big Four

While it is true (as stated) that the big four trace their history back to Europe (especially since Arthur Andersen is no longer with us), I think that overstates the case.

Pricewaterhouse and Coopers are two firms which merged just recently, so stating that it was formed in England is incorrect. Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu also traces its history to Japan. I don't know if both Touche Ross and Deloitte came from England. Ernst & Young wasn't founded by a Scottish accountant since this firm was also the result of a merger of two well established firms.

I think this section, assuming we want to keep it here and not on a separate page, should indicate where all of the multi-national firms came from, and how they all grew through international mergers. A nice flow chart history of the mergers would be pretty.

The other option would be to pull this section and just refer to a seperate page on the Big Four.--Fredrik Coulter 00:43, Mar 1, 2005 (UTC)

International Accounting Standards

The last paragraph implies that the United States is being forced by the good people of Europe into International Accounting Standards. This is incorrect. The SEC and FASB are heavily involved in setting these standards. This paragraph appears to be a POV violation.--Fredrik Coulter 00:46, Mar 1, 2005 (UTC)

Accounting Standards vs. Auditing Standards

I noticed (again) the PCASB on the list of accounting standard setting organizations. It isn't. It sets auditing standards for public companies. So I broke out the auditing standards setting organizations that I know about (in the US). Hopefully someone with some international expertise will add to the list. On the other hand, it's likely that this should be in the auditing article, not the accounting one.--Fredrik Coulter 02:05, Mar 20, 2005 (UTC)

Accounting as a profession

Latest comment: 19 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Is "accounting" a profession? To "profess" a thought is to go out into the world as an individual and express your own ideas and opinions - you are then open to scrutiny as an individual in the world based on the results of the implementation your own ideas and opinions. Firstly, perhaps only 5% of accountants actually have this luxury in the real world of corporations and large practices; current organisational hierarchies simply do not accomodate professional behaviour in its true aspect. Secondly, the societal view of those few accountants that actually personally and individually profess, is seriously degraded due to recent ineptitudes such as Enron's balance sheet. Thirdly, the majority of the work done by the majority of "accountants" requires less skill than a mediocre high school student. In a real, today's world, modern office, practical look at the "profession" of accounting, they seem to have very little to "profess". Simply knowing how to set up a link on an Excel spreadsheet seems an especially cheap definition of a modern professional. The pretense of simply accepting accounting as a profession because of the historic analogy has to be dropped until we can accomodate its actual influence, and moreover those of its individual members as individuals, in a true objective professional light.


Whoever wrote this either thinks the entire world has an IQ > 150 or has obviously never taken any professional accounting exams, at least not in the UK anyway. I agree it may not really be a profession except for those are practically law experts (tax gods etc) but I wouldnt hardly say "the majority of the work done by the majority of "accountants" requires less skill than a mediocre high school student". As regards to the depth of the work involved thats why theres different job titles i.e. accounts clerk/accounts assistant/accounting technican/assistant accountant/accountant/financial controller etc etc at least in the UK anyway.--lincs_geezer 03:56, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

Accounting is a Profession

The argument is falacious from the beginning. Accounting is a profession for two reasons:

1. It has its own body of specialized knowledge and standards (GAAP, GAAS, etc.). 2. Accountants are recognized as such not only by themselves, but by outside authorities, like governments and legal authorities.

Accountants as a group practice many forms of the profession:

1. Certified Public or Chartered Accountants (CPS's) are accountants who audit, review or compile financial statements and profess an opinion on their fairness. This is considered the purest and highest form of the profession by many and is universally recognized as a position of trust (not withstanding Enron and Wroldcom). 2. Managerial Accounants (Certified Managerial Accountants or CMA's) practice accounting within organizations for the most part and provide decision support and analysis to management. They also prepare the statements audited by the CPA's. These are members of the management team and spend a lot of their time managing not only numbers, but people and resources as well. Other forms of this include Internal Auditors. 3. Forensic Accountants (often also CPA's and/or CMA'Sas well) do internal auditing inside companies or other organizations (usually large ones). 4. Academic Accountants are instructors at colleges and universities and form and ivory tower of the profession.

I have been and am three of these at one time, a CPA, CMA and I teach accounting and management part time. Accounting is certainly a profession; I have been doing it for 23 years and I do a little more than set up links in spreadsheets. Knowing where, how and why do put the numbers in the spreadsheets, develop complex models of cost behavior, make judgements about materiality, relevance and other issues are all part of the job, not to mention managing a department, advising the governing body and management and interfacing with banks, governmental agencies and other organization make up my day. No, beginning accountants mostly do not do these things, as they are learning the basics, but once you have been doing this as long as I have you are a professional.

Does anyone else think the external links section is getting out of control? A dozen links, and only one of them makes even some attempt to explain why it should be there in the first place!? The latest addition links to a Belgian forum or something. Has anyone some sort of plan or policy for this article? Rl 10:57, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)

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