Managerial and Financial Accounting Paper

Essay by charles_medleyUniversity, Bachelor'sA, May 2009

download word file, 2 pages 0.0

Managerial accounting's function is to provide information to managers and employees within the organization, those who direct and control its operation (Edmonds, Edmonds, Thomas, McNair, Olds, and Schneider, 2006). Managerial accounts helps managers, plan, evaluate, and control an organization activities as well as aid in the making daily decisions. Good managerial accounting is vital to understanding the profitability of day to day activities and predicting the future profitability in the future. Managerial accounting is in contrast with financial accounting, which is concerned with providing information with stockholders, creditors, and others outside on an organization. Managerial accounting information includes: information on costs of products and services of an organization, budgets and performance reports which compares budges to actual results. Other information that assists in managers in the planning and control of activities include sales backlogs, example of information on revenue of an organization's products and services (Garrison and Noreen, 1999).

Financial accounting is a specialized branch of accounting that keeps track of a company's financial transactions. Using standardized guidelines, the transactions are recorded, summarized, and presented in a financial report or financial statement such as an income statement or a balance sheet. The purpose of companies having financial statements is so they can keep count of their companies' value, as well as their assets. Most companies use financial statements on a daily basis. The statements that are given to outsiders (owners/stockholders/lenders) by the company are usually called external. Companies have the power to decide whether they want to make their financial statements public or not.

Usually, financial accounting is used to create general purpose financial statements such as income statements, balance sheets, statement of cash flow, as well as stockholders' equity statements. Organizations can create and manage their financial statements as long as they comply with the Generally Accepted Accounting...