Critical Evaluation of Accounting Cycle

A financial statements are documents prepared communicating with a business financial activities. Financial statements are a key component of accounting. Financial statements are presented in a structured manner with conventions accepted by accounting and regulatory personnel. There are four different financial statements which includes the balance statement, income statement, retained statement, and the statement of cash flow.

An accounting cycle is a process, or a series of activities, that consists of collecting an organization’s transactions at the end of a reporting period to prepare essential financial statements of a business (Fleury, 2015). The accounting cycle is a strict, methodical set of rules used to ensure the accuracy and conformity of financial statements (Investopedia, 2017). The steps involved with an accounting cycle, the roles each of the step facilitate, the impact of omission, and what financial statements are assembled from the accounting cycle data.

According to Financial and Managerial Accounting, the accounting cycle is the approach companies use to create their financial statements

When you’re looking at the income statement, you can get information about profitability for a particular period. This is also called the profit and loss statement. The income statement is composed of both income and expenses. This statement can be used to deduct expenses from income and report either a net profit or net loss for that period. This statement will deduct all expenses from income and then report your net profit or net loss for that period. This will allow the business owner to determine if the business is bringing in a good amount of revenue to make a profit. The cash flow statement shows the movement in cash and balance over period. The cash flow can vary depending on the operating activities, investing and financing activities. This statement provides one business owner with insight to the company’s liquidity which is vital to the growth of the business. Reinvesting in business is very important, looking at the statement of retained earnings will tell a business owner how much were reinvested in the company. After profitable period, every big business has to give some of its profits to stockholders, and keep the rest amount as retained earnings. Out of all statements, retaining statement is important to companies that sells stocks to the public. This statement can also provide you with assets and liabilities information. These informations can be used to assess the financial health of your business. The results of a balance sheet will help the business owners to show the risk of liquidity and credit. Looking at these information you can measure trends and relationships to show where in the areas you can improve. These can also be compared to similar companies to show how the business measures up to leading competitors (Ali, 2010). In summary, the financial statements can provide a business owner

T-Accounts: This is the second step in the accounting cycle and the purpose of journalizing it in the T-accounts is to record the net change in cash caused by the business event. It also help preparing the statement of cash flow faster and could aid the management understanding the movement of cash and non-cash items.

(Ohara, 2007) Most financial statements are made public for the benefit of stakeholders and potential investors. The bottom-line is that financial statements are the main source for analyzing how well a company is operating. The income (or profit and loss) statement is simply a report card of how much activity (revenue) was performed in the period, how profitable that activity was (gross profit/loss), and what it cost the contractor to run the business (overhead). (Murphy, 2006)

Financial statements provide financial decision makers with varied information presented in specific formats that is easily attainable tools to evaluate financial health. Three of the necessary financial statements are the statement of financial position or the balance sheet, operating statement also called income statement, and the statement of cash flows (Finkler, Jones, and Kovner, 2013).

The beginning step in the accounting cycle is analyzing and recording transactions. This is when the “information gets organized in either an asset, liability, common stock, retained earnings, dividends, revenue, or expense

Accounting is the study of how businesses track their income and assets over time. Accountants engage in a wide variety of activities besides preparing financial statements and recording business transactions. These activities include computing costs and efficiency gains from new technologies, participating in strategies for mergers and acquisitions, quality management, developing and using information systems to track financial

Financial statements of the company are significant for the investors who would like to venture into the business operation. It gives them the insight whether the business is making profits or it is doomed to fail;

Financial statement measures the financial performance, liquidity and strength of the firm, it is important

Accounting transactions are professional occasion that has either a positive or negative budgetary impact on the financial statements. One impact of transactions in a financial statement will increase or decrease the accounts contingent on the transaction that has taken place. The history of revenue that has come or gone from the business will be shown on both financial statements and accounting transactions. Many businesses make several transactions daily. Errors can have a negative impact on financial statements, because the facts come from the accounting transactions

Financial statements are a very useful tool for individuals interested in the organization. Investors use the information to determine if it a wise decision to put their money into the organization. Investors need to determine if the organization has been successful and profitable and will continue to be successful and profitable. Creditors use the financial statements to determine the amount of credit that should be advanced to the organization. Employees generally do not look at the financial statements, but if a new executive was thinking of joining the organization, he or she may want to see the potential of the organization to make sure the investors are becoming a part of a successful organization. Management uses the financial statements on a monthly basis to determine which areas of the organization are profitable and which areas of the organization that needs to be discontinued or restructure to become more profitable.

Financial Statements basically show the historical performance or record of the company at some previous point of time. By the time when financial statements are made public, changes are many economical areas such as market conditions, currency exchange rate and inflations can change the values of assets and liabilities. In this case there often exist discrepancies between book value of assets and their market values.

For a business enterprise, all the relevant financial information, presented in a structured manner and in a form easy to understand, are called the financial statements. They typically include four basic financial statements, accompanied by a management discussion and analysis: