Discovering income tax accounting and reporting
Any discussion of how to use QuickBooks to better manage your business begins with a discussion of the basics of accounting. For this reason, in this chapter and the next two chapters, I attempt to provide the same information that you may receive in an introductory college accounting course. Of course, I tailor the entire discussion to QuickBooks and the small business environment. What you'll read about here and in the next chapters of this book pretty much describes how accounting works in a small business setting using QuickBooks.
If you have had some experience with accounting, if you know how to read an income statement and balance sheet, or if you know how to construct a journal entry, you don't need to read the discussion provided by this chapter or the next. However, if you're new to accounting and business bookkeeping, take the time to carefully read this chapter. The chapter starts by giving a high-level overview of the purpose of accounting. Then, I review the common financial statements that any accounting system worth its salt produces. I also discuss some of the important principles of accounting and the philosophy of accounting. Finally, I talk a little bit about income tax law and tax accounting.
Purpose of Accounting
In the movie Creator, Peter O'Toole plays an eccentric professor. At one point, O'Toole's character attempts to talk a young student into working as an unpaid research assistant. When the student protests, noting that he needs 15 credit hours, O'Toole creates a special 15-credit independent study named "Introduction to the Big Picture." In the next section, I describe the "big picture" of accounting, which is really the appropriate place to begin a discussion of accounting. At its very core, accounting makes perfect, logical sense.
The big picture
The most important thing that you need to understand about accounting is that accounting provides financial information to stakeholders. Stakeholders are the people who do business with or interact with a firm; they include managers, employees, investors, banks, vendors, government authorities, and agencies who may tax a firm. Each of these stakeholders and their information requirements deserve a bit more discussion. Why? Because the information needs of these stakeholders determine what an accounting system needs to do.
Managers, investors, and entrepreneurs
The first category of stakeholders is the managers, investors, and entrepreneurs. This group needs financial information to determine whether a business is making money. This group also wants any information that gives insight into whether a business is growing or contracting, and how healthy or sick it is. In order to fulfill its obligations and duties, this group often needs detailed information. For example, a manager or entrepreneur may want to know which customers are particularly profitable - or unprofitable. An active investor may want to know which product lines are growing or contracting.
A related set of information requirements concerns asset and liability record keeping. An asset is something that the firm owns, such as cash, inventory, or equipment. A liability is some debt or obligation that the firm owes, such as bank loans and accounts payable.
Obviously, someone at a firm - perhaps a manager, bookkeeper, or accountant - needs to have very detailed records of the amount of cash that the firm has in its bank accounts, the inventory that the firm has in its warehouse or on its shelves, and the equipment that the firm owns and uses in its operations.
If you look over the preceding two paragraphs, nothing I've said is particularly surprising regarding the financial information requirements needed by a firm's management. It makes sense, right? Someone who works in a business, manages a business, or actively invests in a business needs good general information about the financial affairs of the firm and, in many cases, very detailed information about important assets (such as cash) and liabilities (such as bank loans).
External creditors
A second category of stakeholders includes outside firms that loan money to a business and credit reporting agencies that supply information to these lenders. For example, banks want to know about the financial affairs and financial condition of a firm before lending money. The accounting system needs to produce the financial information that a bank requires in order to consider a loan request.
What information do lenders want? Lenders want to know that a business is profitable and enjoys a positive cash flow. Profits and positive cash flows allow a business to easily repay debt. In a worst case scenario, a bank or other lender also wants to see assets that can be liquidated to pay a loan - and also other debts that may represent a claim on the firm's assets.
Vendors also typically require financial information from a firm. A vendor often loans a firm money by extending trade credit. What's noteworthy about this is that vendors sometimes require special accounting. For example, one of the categories of vendors that a company such as Wiley Publishing, Inc. deals with is authors. In order to pay an author the royalty that he or she is entitled to, Wiley needs to put in a fair amount of work to calculate royalty-per-unit amounts and then report and remit these amounts to authors.
Other firms sometimes have similar financial reporting requirements for vendors. Franchisees (such as the man or woman who owns and operates the local McDonald's) pay a franchise fee based on revenues. Retailers may need to perform special accounting and reporting in order to enjoy rebates and incentives from the manufacturers of the products that they sell.
Government agencies
Predictable stakeholders requiring financial information from a business are the federal and state government agencies with jurisdiction over the firm. For example, every business in the United States needs to report on its revenues, expenses, and profits so that the firm can correctly calculate income tax due to the federal government and then pay that tax.
Firms with employees must also report to the federal and state government on wages paid to those employees - and pay payroll taxes based on metrics, such as number of employees, wages paid to employees, and unemployment benefits claimed by past employees.
Providing this sort of financial information to government agencies represents a key duty of a firm's accounting system.
Business form generation
In addition to the financial reporting described in the preceding paragraphs, accounting systems typically perform one other key task for businesses: producing business forms. For example, an accounting system almost always produces the checks needed to pay vendors. In addition, an accounting system also prepares the invoices and payroll checks. More sophisticated accounting systems, such as those used by large firms, prepare many other business forms, including purchase orders, monthly customer statements, credit memos to customers, sales receipts, and so forth.
Every accounting function that I have described so far is performed ably by each of the versions of QuickBooks: QuickBooks, QuickBooks Pro, and QuickBooks Premier.
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Reviewing the Common Financial Statements
With the background information just provided, I'm ready to talk about some of the common financial statements or accounting reports that an accounting system like QuickBooks produces. If you understand which reports you want your accounting system to produce, you should find it much easier to collect the raw data necessary to prepare these reports.
In the following paragraphs, I describe the three principal financial statements: the income statement, the balance sheet, and the statement of cash flows. I also briefly describe a fourth, catch-all category of accounting reports.
Don't worry - I'll go through this material slowly. You need to understand what financial statements and accounting systems are supposed to provide and what data these financial statements supply.
The income statement
Perhaps the most important financial statement that an accounting system produces is the income statement. The income statement is also known as a profit and loss statement. An income statement summarizes a firm's revenues and expenses for a particular period of time. Revenues represent amounts that a business earns by providing goods and services to its customers. Expenses represent amounts that a firm spends providing those goods and services. If a business can provide goods or services to customers for revenues that exceed its expenses, the firm earns a profit. If expenses exceed revenues, obviously, the firm suffers a loss.
To show you how this all works - and it's really pretty simple - take a look at Tables 1-1 and 1-2. Table 1-1 summarizes the sales that an imaginary business enjoys. Table 1-2 summarizes the expenses that the same business incurs for the same period of time. These two tables provide all the information necessary to construct an income statement.
Using the information from Tables 1-1 and 1-2, you can construct the simple income statement shown in Table 1-3. Because understanding the details of this income statement is key to your understanding of how accounting works and what accounting tries to do, I want to go into some detail discussing this income statement.
The first thing to note about the income statement shown in Table 1-3 is the sales revenue figure of $13,000. This sales revenue figure shows the sales generated for a particular period of time. The $13,000 figure shown in Table 1-3 comes directly from the Sales Journal shown in Table 1-1.
One important thing to recognize about accounting for sales revenue is that revenue gets counted when goods or services are provided, and not when a customer pays for the goods or services. If you look at the list of sales shown in Table 1-1, for example, Joe (the first customer listed) may have paid $1,000 in cash, but Bob, Frank, and Abdul (the second, third, and fourth customers) may have paid for their purchases with a credit card. Yoshio, Marie, and Jeremy (the fifth, sixth, and seventh customers listed) may not have even paid for their purchases at the time the goods or services were provided. These customers may have simply promised to pay for the purchases at some later date. However, this timing of the payment for goods or services doesn't matter. Accountants have figured out that you count revenue when goods or services are provided. Information about when customers pay for those goods or services, if you want that information, can come from lists of customer payments. Cost of goods sold and gross margins are two other values that you commonly see on income statements. Before I discuss cost of goods sold and gross margins, however, let me add a little more detail to this example. Suppose, for example, that the financial information shown in Tables 1-1, 1-2, and 1-3 shows the financial results from your business: the hot dog stand that you operate for one day at the major sporting event in the city where you live. Table 1-1 describes sales to customers (now hungry customers). Table 1-2 summarizes the one-day expenses of operating your super-duper hot dog stand.
In this case, the actual items that you sell - hot dogs and buns - are separately shown on the income statement as cost of goods sold. By separately showing the cost of the goods sold, the income statement can show what is called a gross margin. The gross margin is the amount of revenue left over after paying for the cost of goods. In Table 1-3, the cost of goods sold shows $3,000 for purchases of dogs and buns. The difference between the $13,000 of sales revenue and the $3,000 of cost of goods sold equals $10,000, which is the gross margin.
Knowing how to calculate gross margin allows you to estimate firm breakeven points and also to perform profit, volume, and cost analyses. All of these techniques are extremely useful for thinking about the financial affairs of your business. In fact, Book VI, Chapter 1 describes how you can perform these sorts of analyses.
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The operating expenses portion of the simple income statement shown in Table 1-3 repeats the other information listed in the Expenses Journal. The $1,000 of rent, the $4,000 of wages, and the $1,000 of supplies get totaled. These operating expenses are then subtracted from the gross.
Do you see, then, what an income statement does? An income statement reports on the revenues that a firm has generated. It shows the cost of goods sold and calculates the gross margin. It identifies and shows operating expenses, and finally, shows the profits of the business.
One other important point: Income statements summarize revenues, expenses, and profits for a particular period of time. Some managers and entrepreneurs, for example, may want to prepare income statements on a daily basis. Public companies are required to prepare income statements on a quarterly and annual basis. And taxing authorities, such as the Internal Revenue Service, require preparation both quarterly and annually.
Technically speaking, the quarterly statements required by the Internal Revenue Service don't need to report revenue. The Internal Revenue Service only requires quarterly statements of wages paid to employees. Only the annual income statements required by the Internal Revenue Service report both revenue and expenses. These are the income statements produced to prepare an annual income tax return.
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Balance sheet
The second most important financial statement that an accounting system produces is a balance sheet. A balance sheet reports on a business's assets, liabilities, and owner contributions of capital at a particular point in time.
* The assets shown on a balance sheet are those items that are owned by the business, which have value, and for which money was paid.
* The liabilities shown on a balance sheet are those amounts that a business owes to other people, businesses, and government agencies.
* The owner's contributions of capital are the amounts that owners, partners, or shareholders have paid into the business in the form of investment or have reinvested in the business by leaving profits inside the company.
As long as you understand what assets and liabilities are, a balance sheet is easy to understand and interpret. Table 1-4, for example, shows a simple balance sheet. Pretend that this balance sheet shows the condition of the hot dog stand at the beginning of the day, before any hot dogs have been sold. The first portion of the balance sheet shows and totals the two assets of the hot dog stand business: the $1,000 of cash that may be in the cash register in a box under the counter, and the $3,000 of hot dogs and buns that you've purchased in order to sell during the day.
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Balance sheets can use several other categories to report assets: accounts receivable (these are amounts that customers owe), investments, fixtures, equipment, and long-term investments. In the case of a small owner-operated business, not all of these asset categories show up. But if you look at the balance sheet of a very large business - say one of the 100 largest businesses in the United States - you will see these sorts of other categories.
The liabilities section of the balance sheet shows the amounts that the firm owes to other people and businesses. For example, the balance sheet in Table 1-4 shows $2,000 of accounts payable and a $1,000 loan payable. Presumably, the $2,000 of accounts payable is the money that you owe to the vendors who have supplied your hot dogs and buns. The $1,000 loan payable represents some loan you've taken out - perhaps from some well-meaning and naive relative.
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Excerpted from QuickBooks All-in-One Desk Reference For Dummiesby Stephen L. Nelson Excerpted by permission.
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