...financial accounting according to the different measurement attributes, can be divided into historical cost accounting, current cost accounting, fair value accounting and other different models. Today is the leading and ruling position, or historical cost accounting model, although it faces challenges, can still be regarded as the basic pattern of financial accounting. 1, the historical cost accounting features 1, the basis for the past recognized. most important feature of the historical cost accounting is a past-oriented. From the basis of confirmation of view, the historical cost accounting is based on past transactions or events have occurred based on. Whether accrual or cash basis, are targeted to have occurred in terms of past transactions. The former caused a result of past transactions and the rights and obligations; the latter a result of past transactions caused by cash. Their common feature is based on transactions or events that have occurred in the foundation. 2, measured at historical cost. This is the essence of historical cost accounting. Assets, liabilities, costs measured at historical cost, provided that for the past history information associated with the lack of reality. 3, follow the decision of revenue realization and matching principle. double-entry bookkeeping has been created, through cost and revenue for the ratio to determine the income, has been the main features of accounting, and constitutes the entire accounting system of...
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...A critical review of the trade-offs between the concepts of relevance and reliability in financial reporting Theme: Financial Accounting Classification: M41 Author: Prof D Coetsee Affiliation: Department of Accountancy, University of Johannesburg, South Africa Contact address: Department of Accountancy R-Ring 607 University of Johannesburg PO Box 524 Auckland Park Johannesburg South-Africa 2006 Telephone: +27-11-559-3047 Fax: +27-11-559-2777 E-Mail dcoetsee@uj.ac.za A critical review of the trade-offs between the concepts of relevance and reliability in financial reporting |Abstract | |In an information orientated system of financial reporting the move from historical cost to fair value | |accounting has created numerous debates surrounding the trade-offs of the concepts of relevance and | |reliability. This article contributes to the debate by critically reviewing the current developments of | |these trade-offs to determine whether current financial reporting guidelines are appropriate to deal with | |the difficulties and uncertainties of financial reporting. The article found that the proposals of the joint| |framework discussion paper goes a long way in resolving the issues around the trade-offs of relevance and | |reliability. Changing the concept of reliability to faithful representation...
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...EXAM QUIZZES Which of the following is not a required component of financial statements prepared in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles? 1. Balance sheet. 2. Notes to financial statements. 3. Income statement. 4. President's letter to shareholders. When should an expenditure be recorded as an asset rather than an expense? 1. Always 2. If the amount is material. 3. When future benefit exists. 4. President's letter to shareholders Recognition of expense related to amortization of an intangible asset illustrates which principle of accounting? 1. Historical cost. 2. Expense recognition. 3. Full disclosure. 4. Revenue recognition. Allowing firms to estimate rather than physically count inventory at interim (quarterly) periods is an example of a 1. Trade-off between timeliness and verifiability. 2. Neutrality and consistency. 3. Verifiability and faithful representation. 4. Faithful representation and comparability. Which accounting assumption or principle is being violated if a company is a party to major litigation that it may lose and decides not to include the information in the financial statements because it may have a negative impact on the company's stock price? 1. Going concern. 2. Historical cost. 3. Expense recognition. 4. Full disclosure. What is the general approach as to when product costs are recognized as expenses? 1. In the period when the vendor invoice is received. 2. In the period when the expenses are incurred. 3...
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...3. Trade off between fair value accounting and historical cost accounting a) Relevance: Financial information is relevant when it influences the economic decisions of users, Fair value reporting is more relevant as it will allow users of financial statements to obtain a truer and fairer view of the company's real financial situation since it reflects the prevailing economic conditions and the changes in them. In contrast, historical cost accounting shows the conditions that existed when the transaction took place and any possible changes in the price do not appear until the asset is realized. b) Reliability: This relates to the degree of assurance capable of being obtained through verification that information faithfully represents what it purports to represent. Historical cost is considered more reliable as fair value requires estimations. FASB has expand the disclosures and framework for all companies to enhance the reliability of fair value accounting. However the drawbacks of the FV accounting is still holds as many of the valuations incorporates many subjective input data and assumptions. c) Decision usefulness: In general, financial information is considered to be useful if it enhances one's ability to make investment and credit decisions. (i) For investors: Investors will need to broaden their knowledge of fair value measurement methodologies to effectively analyze a company's financial statements and make a sound comparison. Given that institutions may use different...
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...statements? What type of accounting disclosure is required if this concept is not applied? Consistency allows for the same accounting principle from period to period. A change in principle requires statement disclosure. 3. The president of your firm, Lesky and Lesky, has little background in accounting. Today, he walked into your office and said, “A year ago we bought a piece of land for $100,000. This year, inflation has driven prices up by 6%, and an appraised just told us we could easily resell the land for $115,000. Yet our balance sheet still shows it at $100,000. It should be valued at $115,000. That’s what it’s worth. Or, at a minimum, at $106,000.” Respond to this statement with specific reference to the accounting principles applicable in this situation. The concept of historical cost determines the balance sheet valuation of land. The realization concept requires that a transaction has occurred for the profit to be recognized. 4. Identify the accounting principle(s) applicable to each of the following situations: a. Tim Roberts owns a bar and a rental apartment and operates a consulting service. He has separate financial statements for each. (Entity) b. An advance collection for magazine subscriptions is reported as a liability titled Unearned Subscriptions. (Realization) c. Purchases for office or store equipment for less than $25 are entered in Miscellaneous Expense. (Materiality) d. A company uses the lower of cost or market for valuation of...
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...principal with their agent BONDING COSTS *cost borne by the agent as a result of the aligning their interst EG: i)agent prepare the fs(effort & time) ii)Constraints manaher xtvt MONITORING COST *the cost observing & monitoring the agent’s behaviour EG: I )auditing cost ii)Budget restriction iii) Operating rules Agency Costs -due to self interst, the agent may act for their best interest. -Agency problem give rises the agency costs JENSEN & MECKLING (1976) *Contract under which on or more (principals) engage another person (the agent) to perform some service on the principal’s behalf which involves delegating some decision making authority to the agent *Utility maximization by both parties (eg: there is no reason to believe that the agent will always act in the principal’s best interest.) Agency problem -problem of inducing an agent to behave as if he were maximizing the principal’s welfare. Focus on delegation of jobs from principal to the agent AGENCY THEORY POSITIVE -Descriptive, explanatory or predictive -describe how people do behave -largely dismissive NORMATIVE -Prescriptive -prescribe how people (acctnt) should behave to achieve an outcome that is judge to be right, moral,just. DIFFERENCE BETWEEN NORMATIVE & POSITIVE POSITIVE THEORY -Explain what happening in real world -Explaining reasons for current practice Predicting the role of accounting information in decision making TRUE INCOME -deriving a single...
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...CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK * The overall objectives of financial statements of The Framework Provide information about the financial position, performance and changes in financial position of an enterprise that is useful to a wide range of users in making economic decisions. Financial statements prepared for this purpose meet the common needs of most users. The economic decisions that are taken by users of financial statements require an evaluation of the ability of an enterprise to generate cash and cash equivalents and of the timing and certainty of their generation. Users are better able to evaluate this ability to generate cash and cash equivalents if they are provided with information that focuses on the financial position (provided in a balance sheet), performance (provided in an income statement) and changes in financial position of an enterprise. * The Framework first of all outlines the users of accounting information in a manner broadly * Investors The providers of risk capital and their advisers are concerned with the risk inherent in and return provided by, their investments. They need information to help them determine whether they should buy, hold or sell. Shareholders are also interested in information which enables them to assess the ability of the enterprise to pay dividends. * Employees Employees and their representative groups are interested in information about the stability and profitability of their employers. They are also interested in information...
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...DEFENCE OF HISTORICAL COST ACCOUNTING i. Historical cost is relevant in making economic decisions. * Ijiri present 3 reasons historical cost is relevant for making decision * It effect the evaluation n selection of decision rules. It used the past info to measures the quality of their past decisions. * Provides input for satisficing notion where some managers make decisions that will support expected or satisfactory outcome. They are consider how much has already earned rather than how much mote they can earn. * It is used bcoz it imposed on decision makers by their environment. Eg: taxation decision n cost plus contract. ii. Historical cost is based on actual, not merely possible transaction. * Record done based on actual transactions made. * Ijiri- it possible to prepared a balance she on the basis of year-end market price without references to actual transactions. * Historical cost provides evidences for determining how efficiency management has meet their responsibilities. iii. Through history, FS based on historical cost have been found to be useful. * Mautz – “if whose who make management n investment decision had found financial reports based on historical cost useful over the years, changes in acctg would long since have been mad” iv. The best understood concept of profit is the access of selling price over historical cost. * People understand the basic notion of actual cost compared to...
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...EXAM QUIZZES Which of the following is not a required component of financial statements prepared in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles? 1. Balance sheet. 2. Notes to financial statements. 3. Income statement. 4. President's letter to shareholders. When should an expenditure be recorded as an asset rather than an expense? 1. Always 2. If the amount is material. 3. When future benefit exists. 4. President's letter to shareholders Recognition of expense related to amortization of an intangible asset illustrates which principle of accounting? 1. Historical cost. 2. Expense recognition. 3. Full disclosure. 4. Revenue recognition. Allowing firms to estimate rather than physically count inventory at interim (quarterly) periods is an example of a 1. Trade-off between timeliness and verifiability. 2. Neutrality and consistency. 3. Verifiability and faithful representation. 4. Faithful representation and comparability. Which accounting assumption or principle is being violated if a company is a party to major litigation that it may lose and decides not to include the information in the financial statements because it may have a negative impact on the company's stock price? 1. Going concern. 2. Historical cost. 3. Expense recognition. 4. Full disclosure. What is the general approach as to when product costs are recognized as expenses? 1. In the period when the vendor invoice is received. 2. In the period when the expenses are incurred. 3...
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...Chapter 2: Conceptual Framework Underlying Financial Reporting Objective 1: Indicate the usefulness and describe the main components of a conceptual framework for financial reporting * First, to be useful, standard setting should build on an established body of concepts and objectives. Having a soundly developed conceptual framework as their starting point, standard setters are then able to issue additional useful and consistent standards over time. The result is a coherent set of standards and rules, as they have all been built upon the same foundation. It is important that such a framework increase financial statement users' understanding of and confidence in financial reporting, and that it enhance the comparability of different companies' financial statements. * Second, by referring to an existing framework of basic theory, it should be possible to solve new and emerging practical problems more quickly. It is difficult, if not impossible, for standard setters to quickly state the proper accounting treatment for highly complex situations. Practising accountants, however, must solve such problems on a day-to-day basis. By using good judgement, and with the help of a universally accepted conceptual framework, it is hoped that accountants will be able to decide against certain alternatives quickly and to focus instead on a logical and acceptable treatment * At the first level, the objectives identify accounting's goals and purposes: these are the conceptual framework's...
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...INTRODUCTION United States Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) is the standard platform of guidelines that governs the rules of financial accounting utilized in the preparation of financial statements. The US GAAP can be quite flexible in its interpretations and rulings, but the framework of GAAP is based upon certain constraints and principles in the preparation of financial reports. This paper shall endeavor to address the organization of GAAP and some of the specific areas of its governing responsibility. BODY GAAP is defined as a set of accounting patterns that are required to prepare and report the financial statements of public and private companies and non-profit organizations in the United States. It hand down the standards and rules for the aid of accountants so that they can record and prepare a summary of their transactions, for their financial statements. The Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB) in the United States is responsible for codifying the rules of GAAP that is referred to as US GAAP. In the United States, the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA), The Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) provide guidance, assistance, and enforcement of the standard acceptable practices of accounting. GAAP is used to prepare all the financial documents of a company and increase its understandability and faithfulness for the investors. Without GAAP, companies...
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...C H A P T E R 2 CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK FOR FINANCIAL REPORTING LEARNING OBJECTIVES After studying this chapter, you should be able to: •1 •2 •3 •4 Describe the usefulness of a conceptual framework. Describe efforts to construct a conceptual framework. Understand the objective of financial reporting. Identify the qualitative characteristics of accounting information. Define the basic elements of financial statements. •6 •7 Describe the basic assumptions of accounting. Explain the application of the basic principles of accounting. Describe the impact that constraints have on reporting accounting information. •8 •5 What Is It? Everyone agrees that accounting needs a framework—a conceptual framework, so to speak—that will help guide the development of standards. To understand the importance of developing this framework, let’s see how you would respond in the following two situations. SITUATION 1: “Taking a Long Shot . . . ” To supplement donations collected from its general community solicitation, Tri-Cities United Charities holds an Annual Lottery Sweepstakes. In this year’s sweepstakes, United Charities is offering a grand prize of $1,000,000 to a single winning ticket holder. A total of 10,000 tickets have been printed, and United Charities plans to sell all the tickets at a price of $150 each. Since its inception, the Sweepstakes has attracted area-wide interest, and United Charities has always been able to meet its sales target. However, in the...
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...and utilization of resources by such processes. Wide varieties of stakeholders use these measures in making a range of economic decisions about business organizations. Pension fund managers, as do stockholders and financial analysts, use accounting information reported by companies to assess the economic performance of those companies and form expectations of future performance. Production managers use accounting information to estimate the cost of products they produce and thus, the relatively profitability of producing more of some products and less of others. Executives use accounting information to budget economic resources among operating units. Stakeholder decisions generally have in common the objective of allocating scarce economic resources to their most productive uses, whether it is managers allocating organizational resources among subunits (or alliances of organizations) or capital owners allocating their capital among organizations (or portfolios of organizations). Consequently, it is vital for accountants to understand measurement concepts (theories) in order to achieve accounting's measurement objectives. We start with a working definition of measurement. Measurement is the assignment of numerals and other symbols to represent the magnitude of an attribute of a phenomenon. 2 A phenomenon is an object of interest to those who make decisions based, at least in part, on or about the phenomenon. In business, a relevant phenomenon can be a thing such as a particular asset...
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...CHAPTER 2 CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK UNDERLYING FINANCIAL ACCOUNTING Show Me the Earnings! The growth of new-economy business on the Internet has led to the development of new measures of performance. When Priceline.com splashed onto the dot-com scene, it touted steady growth in a measure called “unique offers by users” to explain its heady stock price. To draw investors to its stock, Drugstore.com focused on the number of “unique customers” at its website. After all, new businesses call for new performance measures, right? Not necessarily. In fact, these indicators failed to show any consistent relationship between profits and website visits. Eventually, as the graphs below show, the profits never materialized, and stock prices fell. The lesson here: Although the new economy may require some new measures, investors need to be careful not to forget the reliable traditional ones. PRICELINE.COM Net unique offers by users 3.0 million 2.0 1.0 0 I II III IV 1999 I II III IV 2000 DRUGSTORE.COM Unique customers 2.0 million 1.5 1.0 0.5 0 I II III IV 1999 I II III IV 2000 Stock price $120 a share 80 40 0 I II III IV 1999 I II III IV 2000 2000-IV close $2.13 Stock price $40 a share 30 20 10 0 I II III IV 1999 I II III IV 2000 2000-IV close $1.03 Source: Story and graphs adapted from Gretchen Morgenson, “How Did They Value Stocks? Count the Absurd Ways,” New York Times (March 18, 2001), section 3, p. 1. 34 Copyright ©2008 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Preview of Chapter 2 ...
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...PROS AND CONS OF FAIR VALUE ACCOUNTING Abstract The speed of globalization in the capital markets and the increasing complexity of financial instruments have caused financial statement users to question the relevance and usefulness of historical cost accounting (HCA). The propensity to use fair value accounting (FVA) is imminent as we enter into a borderless economy and as financial markets evolve that require more current and relevant financial information. The U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) and International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) joint effort to establish a uniform accounting standard has caused alarm to U.S. companies and accounting professionals. They contend that fair value accounting has some inherent flaws that will cause adverse effects in the economy. This paper will compare fair value accounting and historical cost accounting and will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the two valuation methods. It will also explore several issues embedded between the two valuation methods and will examine other alternatives possible to reduce the limitations inherent between the two valuations. Key words: fair value accounting, historical cost accounting, and pro-cyclicality Introduction The use of fair value accounting has gained so much attention in the past decade due to the global economy and increasing complexity of financial instruments. Many critics believe that fair value accounting offers more relevant and...
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