Book Description

Excerpt from The School of Applied Business Science, Vol. 1: General Accounting The basic principles on which the foundation of bookkeeping and accounting arc built will probably outlast any treatise on the subject. A writer of a text book on accounting does not concern himself so much with discovering new laws as with the manner of presenting old ones, those that have long stood the test of practice and are now accepted as self-evident truths. It would be difficult indeed for him to change the fundamental rule of debit and credit, for example, or to find a substitute for the idea of analyzing and classifying business facts by means of keeping certain records. The best that he can do, probably, is to describe the modern way of attaining desired accounting ends, offering, perhaps, some original suggestion of his own in regard to methods, as distinguished from basic principles. We do not claim in this work to have "invented" anything in accounting. We have rather devoted our attention largely to two things, first and foremost to the logical development of the course, and secondly to an attempt to suggest how the study of accounting can be made more attractive by the use of imagination. By this we do not mean that we have introduced any fairy tales to lighten the reading, but we have tried to picture, wherever possible, an analogy between accounting facts and every day experiences in life. To some, accounting seems like a hard, uninteresting subject, utterly devoid of anything that even borders on poetry or romance. To them it is all tragedy. They have a vague idea that it is somehow just a matter of arithmetic. This is not the truth. Figures are merely a means to the end. Planning plays the leading role. Even those parts of accounting that may be considered the driest have their counterparts in real life to give them human interest, if the student can be induced to use his imagination to find them, just as there are "sermons in stones" for those who have ears to hear them. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.