What exactly is Accounting

According to Accounting Explained With Brief History and Modern Job Requirements

"Accounting is the process of recording financial transactions pertaining to a business. The accounting process includes summarizing, analyzing, and reporting these transactions to oversight agencies, regulators, and tax collection entities. The financial statements used in accounting are a concise summary of financial transactions over an accounting period, summarizing a company's operations, financial position, and cash flows."

Bookkeeping and Accounting are not the same function; however, Accounting is synonymous with Bookkeeping. All businesses require a good bookkeeper to manage their data inputs and record keeping. A thriving business has a GREAT bookkeeper who is efficient, knowledgeable, and precise. A growing and profitable business, though, has an Accountant who has mastered all the areas of a financial office. Accounting, in my book, would be the ability to enter and manage data accurately and passionately. What do I mean by that? An intelligent person can allocate and enter data; they can even analyze data. However, doing so with an exquisite accuracy and concern for the data is a rare find. That person understands there is an art and a precision to this data entry and financial duty. The art of most accurately depicting the transaction, the art of honoring certain required thought and attention would begin to describe this person or process.

Accounting means adhering to oversight agencies' regulations with ethical excellence. It means being more than knowledgeable about data entry. It comes with a standard within itself. It's a conglomerate of many facets of ability, wisdom, training, experience, education, and perfection. I believe it is a specialty not all financial personnel can perform.

A private Accountant is NOT a Certified Public Accountant (CPA); but does bring a lot of experience and knowledge to the table. Accounting for businesses will include proper data entry, mastering accounts payable AND receivable, and be able to analyze data when running monthly reports. Accounting includes areas such as sales tax, commission processing, balancing cash and paying bills timely, account reconciliations, month-end processing, investigation into transaction history, etc. Accounting is not the ability to give tax or investment advice! A great accountant will possess the ability to help you manage your financial health in day-to-day operations.