Other purposes of accounting systems

Accounting systems are designed mainly to provide information that managers and outsiders can use in decision making. They also serve other purposes: to produce operating documents, to protect the company’s assets, to provide data for company tax returns, and, in some cases, to provide the basis for reimbursement of costs by clients or customers.

The accounting organization is responsible for preparing documents that contain instructions for a variety of tasks, such as payment of customer bills or preparing employee payrolls. It prepares confidential documents, such as records of employees’ salaries and wages. Many of these documents also serve other accounting purposes, but they would have to be prepared even if no information reports were necessary. Measured by the number of people involved and the amount of time required, document preparation is one of the biggest jobs performed by an organization’s accounting department.

Accounting systems must provide means of reducing the chance of losses of assets due to carelessness or dishonesty on the part of employees, suppliers, and customers. Asset protection devices are often very simple; for example, many restaurants use numbered meal checks so that waiters will not be able to submit one check to the customer and another, with a lower total, to the cashier. Other devices entail a partial duplication of effort or a division of tasks between two individuals to reduce the opportunity for unobserved thefts.

These are all part of the company’s system of internal controls. Another important element in this system is internal auditing. The task of internal auditors is to see whether prescribed data handling and asset protection procedures are being followed. To accomplish this, they usually observe some of the work as it is being performed and examine a sample of past transactions for accuracy and fidelity to the system. Internal auditors might also insert a set of fictitious data into the system to see whether the resulting output meets a predetermined standard. This technique is particularly useful in testing the validity of new computer systems.

The accounting system must also provide data for use in the completion of the company’s tax returns. This function is the concern of tax accounting. In some countries financial accounting must conform to tax accounting rules laid down by national tax laws and regulations, and tabulations prepared for tax purposes often diverge from those submitted to shareholders and others. “Taxable income,” it should be remembered, is a legal concept rather than an accounting concept, and tax laws typically contain incentives that encourage companies to do certain things while discouraging them from doing others. Accordingly, what is “income” or “capital” to a tax agency may be far different from the accountant’s measures of these same concepts. Finally, accounting systems in some companies must provide cost data in the forms required for submission to customers who have agreed to reimburse the company for costs incurred on the customers’ behalf.