What do you mean by financial accounting? Explain the four main limitation of financial accounting?
Answers
HOLA MATE
ANSWER
Financial Accounting is concerned with providing information to external users. It refers to the preparation of general purpose reports for use by persons outside a business enterprise, such as shareholders (existing and potential), creditors,etc.
Accountants are often blind to these limitations. So, I am covering its limitation a lot of ground.
Read below and understand :-
1. Financial accounting is of historical nature
Net effect of transactions are recorded in financial accounting which has happened in past. These accounts is just postmortem of all events of business in past .These record does not help for future planning and other managerial decisions. Financial accounting shows the profitability of business but it is failure to tell that is it good or bad. Financial accounting is also failure to know the reasons of low profitability position.
2. Financial accounting deals with overall profitability
Accounts of business are made by a way which shows only overall profitability .It does not shows net profit per product , or per department or according to job . Thus to find difficult to all activities which do not give profit. So, it creates inefficiency in business activities.
3. Absence of full disclosure of facts
In financial accounting we record only those activities and transactions which we can show or describe in money. There are many other facts of business which are non financial and non monetary like efficient management, demand of products of firm , good relations in industry , good working environments which can not be known by financial accounting .
4. Financial reports are interim report of business
Financial statements made by financial accounting is the interim report of firm’s all business work but financial position and profitability which are shown in it is not fully true . Due to adopting cost concept, all transactions are recorded on it real cost but by changing in the time; it is the need of time to adjust cost of assets and liabilities according to inflation of market. Because, financial accounting does not records according to inflation so its result does not show true position of business.
5. Incomplete knowledge of costs
From cost point of view, financial accounting is incomplete. In financial accounting, accountant does not calculate each and every product’s total cost. So, financial accounting does not help to determine the price of product of business.