Quotes About Accounting

Most people don't reconcile their bank accounts.

A record company used to be a very good thing, but they ended up soul-destroyingly trapping people in the accounting department. And you couldn't get any further, and the heads of each department were changing all the time, so you couldn't have any permanent relationship within the corporation.

Art history and Elizabethan poetry don't employ workers; the arduous and tedious application of business sciences such as computer programming and accounting does.

It is not easy to calculate the cost of land to build individual or community toilet systems. But we need to account for it when we total up the true cost of sanitation.

That's the last time I let Wesley Snipes help me out with my taxes!

People are accustomed to thinking of accounting as dry and boring, a necessary evil used primarily to prepare financial reports and survive audits, but that is because accounting is something that has become taken for granted.

I call the traditional numbers used to judge startups "vanity metrics," and innovation accounting requires us to avoid the temptation to use them.

Although we write the feedback loop as Build-Measure-Learn because the activities happen in that order, our planning really works in the reverse order: we figure out what we need to learn, use innovation accounting to figure out what we need to measure to know if we are gaining validated learning, and then figure out what product we need to build to run that experiment and get that measurement.

The method I recommend is called innovation accounting, a quantitative approach that allows us to see whether our engine-tuning efforts are bearing fruit. It also allows us to create learning milestones, which are an alternative to traditional business and product milestones. Learning milestones are useful for entrepreneurs as a way of assessing their progress accurately and objectively; they are also invaluable to managers and investors who must hold entrepreneurs accountable.

Traditional accounting judges new ventures by the same standards it uses for established companies, but these indications are not reliable predictors of a startup's future prospects.

Innovation accounting. To improve entrepreneurial outcomes and hold innovators accountable, we need to focus on the boring stuff: how to measure progress, how to set up milestones, and how to prioritize work. This requires a new kind of accounting designed for startups—and the people who hold them accountable.

Whenever possible, the innovation team should be cross-functional and have a clear team leader, like the Toyota shusa. It should be empowered to build, market, and deploy products or features in the sandbox without prior approval. It should be required to report on the success or failure of those efforts by using standard actionable metrics and innovation accounting.

Unfortunately, standard accounting is not helpful in evaluating entrepreneurs. Startups are too unpredictable for forecasts and milestones to be accurate.

Innovation accounting begins by turning the leap-of-faith assumptions discussed in Chapter 5 into a quantitative financial model. Every business plan has some kind of model associated with it, even if it's written on the back of a napkin. That model provides assumptions about what the business will look like at a successful point in the future.

we figure out what we need to learn, use innovation accounting to figure out what we need to measure to know if we are gaining validated learning, and then figure out what product we need to build to run that experiment and get that measurement.

never run a game of Hide the Lady if you can't remember where you've put the queen, because some people embrace forensic accounting as a blood sport.

Creditors have better memories than debtors.

Regulations for international accounting and funding will have to be examined to identify policies that inadvertently discourage institutional investors from putting their resources into longer-term, illiquid assets.

I thought I could start over, you see. But now I know you can never start over. Not really. You think you have control, but you are like a fly in somebody else's web. Sometimes I think that's why I like accounting. All day, you are only dealing with numbers. You add them, multiply them, and if you are careful, you will always have a solution. There's a sequence there. An order. With numbers, you can have control….

you will depend on how you do your accounting. People often talk jokingly about how "creative" accountants can make a corporate balance sheet look as good or as bad as they want it to look. Well, the point here is that we are all creative accountants when it comes to keeping our own psychological balance sheet.

People seek revenge by an accounting that exaggerates their innocence and their adversary's malice; when two sides seek perfect justice, they condemn themselves and their heirs to strife.

El pulpero. A buena cuenta.

We may be certain that, by the logic of double-entry accounting, these two percent will reappear in other records than the election statistics, for instance in the registers of penitentiaries and penal labor camps, or in those places where God alone counts the victims.

The financial report makes it very clear that if we got into honest budgeting today, that in fact we would find ourselves with a much larger deficit than we have today.