Quotes About Accounting

I think that, every time you see the word EBITDA, you should substitute the words "bullshit earnings.

But people can not move a company toward competitive excellence if they are rewarded for meeting top-down accounting-based targets, not for continuously seeking better ways to satisfy customers, internal and external.

What I believe has happened in American businesses since the 1950s is that managers and operating personnel at all levels have lost sight of people, customers, and processes as top management has turned everyone's attention to accounting results.

Now," said the young man, stooping gravely over his book of bills, "if you can assure me that I really can buy this kind of pious, and that it will be set down to my account in the book up above, as something belonging to me, I wouldn't care if I did go a little extra for it. How d'ye say?" "Wal, raily, I can't do that," said the trader. "I'm a thinkin that every man'll have to hang on his own hook, in them ar quarters.

The income tax is the biggest single intrusion suffered by the American people. It forces every worker to be a bookkeeper, to open his records to the government, to explain his expenses, to fear conviction for a harmless accounting error. Compliance wastes billions of dollars. It penalizes savings and creates an enormous drag on the U.S. economy. It is incompatible with a free society, and we aren't libertarians if we tolerate it.

For generations of Hong Kongers, the only means of upward mobility and the only way to meaningfully contribute to society have been to obtain a respectable university degree (preferably in business administration) and a professional accreditation (in finance, accounting, law or medicine).

America has two national budgets, one official, one unofficial.

I always said capital and conservative accounting are protection. So it's the preparation beforehand: capital, reporting, and liquidity," Dimon added.

Men did then no more die by tale and by number. They might put out a weekly bill, and call them seven or eight thousand, or what they pleased; 'tis certain they died by heaps, and were buried by heaps, that is to say, without account.

This view of farming has been dominant now for a generation, and so it is not too soon to ask: How well does it work? We must answer that it works as any industrial machine works: very "efficiently" according to the terms of an extremely specialized accounting. That is to say that it apparently makes it possible for about 4 percent of the population to "feed" the rest.

and cleaned out the joint Westbeach account),

Seuls les ménages agricoles élèvent des cochons, mais c'est dans tous les ménages que l'on cuit des côtelettes. Par conséquent tous les ménages, et non les seuls ménages agricoles, produisent pour leur propre consommation. C'est donc une somme importante de services et de valeurs que néglige la Comptabilité nationale.

The notion that every item of exchange must be accounted for and that 'the books must balance' preceded by centuries Robert von Mayer's doctrine of the conservation of energy.

The concept of fair value accounting is correct and useful, but the application during periods of crisis is problematic. It's another one of those unintended consequences of making a rule that's supposed to be good that turns out the other way.

The U.S. government uses cash accounting. That is illegal for any enterprise of any size in America except for the U.S. government. Every for-profit business, every not-for-profit business, every state and local government has to use real accounting except for Uncle Sam.

This Department of Treasury, run by this administration, using the same tried and true accounting methods that every business in America uses, cast new light on the fiscal severity that our Nation is facing, what some would call a mess.

You might be thinking, "My business responsibilities don't include clients and selling. I'm in the accounting/human resources/quality-control/MIS/production department." Think again. The fact is, everyone is in sales.

My mom bought a computer in the '80s to do accounting, and she was so smart at computers that we spent all our time with them. My childhood was sitting on the floor of her office and figuring out how to program with my mom.

The right way to think about domain knowledge is as a corporate capital asset, as dollars of investment in the head of each knowledge worker, put there by organizational investment in that employee. When that person leaves, the asset is gone. If you did a rigorous accounting of this human capital, you would be obliged to declare an extraordinary loss each time one of your people quit.

The newspapers say that this ripping off the four billion or so of Tribal royalty money has been going on for more than fifty years. And they're quoting the government bean counters. Right? I can't see much hope of me finding anything new.

despite the absence of a real state monopoly on violence, early states were much more formidable structures than chiefdoms. And everywhere they appear, they are associated with the same cluster of features. These include new forms of specialization and an extensive division of labor, bureaucracies, systems of accounting and writing, armies, and fiscal systems.

Instead of finding new ways to support innovation and investment while achieving short-term goals, they fall back on the same old strategies, policies, and procedures, relying on accounting sleight-of-hand to make it all work.

The core accounting equation A = L + E can be dissolved and reshuffled into everything from E = A - L to beyond.

The Social Sciences are good at accounting for disasters once they have taken place.