What is Litigation Funding?, Its Advantages and Disadvantages
Legal costs have long been a deterrent for people wanting to file lawsuits. In a country like America, the legal fees can be significant. A lot of good lawyers charge hourly fees. Many plaintiffs believe that in an hourly fee system, the lawyer is incentivized to drag the case for as long as possible. This […]
Pension Obligation Bonds
Pension funds across the world are facing a significant financial crisis. This is because, for a very long time, they have been investing heavily in equities since the interest rates offered by debt funds were quite low. However, in the recent past, the equity markets have sharply declined. As a result, the asset values of […]
Types of Hedge Funds
Hedge funds are simply funds with high leverage and no regulation. They have come into existence in the past couple of decades or so. However, a lot of fund managers have used different strategies and different asset classes. The result is a proliferation of the types of hedge funds. The modern investor therefore has a […]
The Sunk Cost Fallacy
In the previous article, we learned about how certain psychological factors make a huge impact on our decision-making about financial investment. We studied about what loss aversion is and how it impacts the decisions that we make. There is another psychological fallacy that is responsible for a lot of losses in the stock market. In […]
A Primer on Private Placements
When we think about investment banks, as well as the activities that they undertake, we tend to think about initial public offerings, debt syndication, and other such activities that are very visible to the public eye. However, the reality is that a lot of investments that are routed via investment banks are actually private placements. […]
Every activity that a business firm does must be done for a reason and accounting is no exception. Accounting helps the company achieve a myriad of objectives. Here is the list of objectives that accounting helps the company to obtain.
Any business firm needs a permanent record of the transactions that it indulges in. These records could be required for internal purpose, for taxation purpose or for any other purpose. Accounting serves this function.
Whenever the organization commits any resource of monetary value either within the firm or outside the firm, a record is made. This permanent record is held on for years and can be retrieved as and when need be.
A business firm may indulge in numerous transactions every day. It may make profit in some of these transactions while it may make losses in some other transactions. However, the effect of all these transactions needs to be aggregated over a period of time.
There must be daily, weekly and monthly reports which provides information to the organization about how well it is performing its activities. Accounting serves this purpose by providing periodic financial statements which help the firm adjust their operations accordingly.
Firms need resources for their functioning. They do not have any capital stock at hand and need to obtain them from investors. Investors will give money to the firm only if they have reasonable assurance that the firm will be able to generate enough profit. Past accounting records help a great deal in proving this. All kinds of investors from banks to shareholders ask for past accounting details before they trust the management with their money.
Firms can also conduct useful internal analysis with the help of accounting data. Accounting records tell the firm what resources were committed to what activity and what time. These records also summarize the return that was obtained from these activities. Management can then analyze past behavior and draw lessons about how they could have performed better and used resources more efficiently.
Accounting helps management and investors look forward. Costs and revenue growths can be projected after substantial data has been accumulated. The assumption made is that the company is likely to behave exactly as it has done in the past. Thus, analysts can make reasonable assumptions about the future based on the past record.
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An Overview of Contracts and Why They are Important to Business and Society
February 12, 2025
