学习必需的技术技能，从而掌握分析财务报表和披露财务信息用于财务分析的能力，并了解会计标准和高管层激励对财务报告流程的影响。学完本课程后，您将学会阅读三种最常见的财务报表：利润表、资产负债表和现金收支一览表。然后，您可以运用所学技能处理现实商务挑战，这也是沃顿商学院商务基础专项课程的组成部分。
1.1.1: 财务报表概述
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财务会计概论（中文版）
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From the lesson
第 1 周：简介和资产负债表
学习会计学就像学习一门外语，您要做大量基础练习（语法、句法、习语等）。 要阅读以这门“外语”（我们以财务报表为例）书写的书籍，您必须掌握本材料中介绍的基础知识。 我们从本周开始学习这些基础知识。 我们首先要学习的是财务报表概述。 需要使用哪些类型的报表？ 规则由谁制定？ 规则由谁实施？ 然后，我们将介绍资产负债表等式并定义/探讨资产、负债和股东权益。 我们将介绍借贷记账，并做许多将交易“翻译”成借项和贷项的练习。最后，我们将通过一家创业公司的案例，帮助您深入了解从记录新公司首笔交易开始，到制作首套财务报表全程必需的所有环节。
Meet the Instructors
Brian J BusheeThe Geoffrey T. Boisi Professor
Accounting
>> Hello, I'm Professor Brian Bushee and
welcome to the first video in An Introduction to Financial Accounting.
In this video,
we're going to provide an overview of the financial reporting landscape.
What's required in financial reporting?
Who makes the rules?
Who enforces the rules?
What are the basic set of financial statements?
We've got a lot to get to in this course and I'm really excited, so
let's get started.
Let's start with a definition.
Accounting is a system for recording information about business transactions
to provide summary statements of a company's financial position and
performance to users who requires such information.
>> Wow, please tell me the whole video won't be this boring.
>> [LAUGH] I sure hope not.
But to spice things up a little bit, I will bring in some virtual students
every now and then to ask questions or make petty comments.
Anyway, this definition has three parts.
The first part is recording transactions.
This part turns out to be a big deal as not everything a business does gets
recorded in the financial statements and sometimes it'll seem like nothing's
happening, yet will it need to record a transaction anyway.
The second part is about providing summary statements.
Large companies have billions and billions of transactions every year.
If they made them available to you in a gigantic database, your first
question would be, how can I summarize all this into one or two summary numbers?
And the third part focuses on users,
because different user groups would want different summary numbers.
So, most companies have to keep three sets of books.
Our focus in this course will be the first set of books or financial accounting.
This standardized set of statements in geared towards
external users like investors, creditors, customers, suppliers,
competitors and any other stakeholder or person that has interest in the company.
However, these financial statements are not used to determine taxes.
There's a separate set of books based on tax rules that are used to
compute how much taxes a company has to pay.
These rules are often quite different from what we do in financial statements.
Finally, there's managerial accounting.
This provides customized reports for internal decision-making.
We're not going to cover this topic in this course, but
I want to make you aware of the fact that the financial accounting that we do talk
about is generally not used to internal decision-making instead there are other
kinds of numbers that are looked at.
So, what are the financial reporting requirements?
The Securities and Exchange Commission or
SEC requires periodic financial statement filings.
Companies must file and annual report or 10-K once a year.
This includes a full set of financial statements with a substantial amount of
additional disclosure.
This thing generally runs 2 to 300 pages.
The other three quarters of the year, firms must file a quarterly report or
10-Q which has a full set of financial statements, but
less required disclosure than the annual report.
If anything material happens between quarter ends,
companies must file an 8-K or current report.
Material information is generally viewed as anything important enough to move stock
price, which means companies files these quite often.
They don't require the financial statements just an update of whatever
major corporate event has happened, something like a top manager resigns or
you lose a big customer or there's a lawsuit or something along those lines.
All of these filings have to be prepared in accordance with
Generally Accepted Accounting Principles or GAAP.
>> Excuse me, does this stuff only apply to US companies?
>> That's a good question.
I should note that this will be a US centric course,
because I'm at a US business school.
However, the things that we cover will be applicable globally.
So for instance, even though we're talking about SEC filing requirements in the US,
every country in the world that has a securities market has fine requirements
like an annual report.
The only difference you might see internationally is instead of a quarterly
report, some countries require semiannual reporting.
This also only formally applies to public companies, but private companies that need
to go to a bank to borrow money often times are required to provide financial
statements on a quarterly or annual frequency, because the banks are so used
to getting financial statement information in that format and in that frequency.
So, this is a pretty universal set of filing requirements that apply to public
and private companies around the world.
These periodic filing requirements create much of the tension in financial
accounting.
For example, let's say, we ship goods to a customer in one quarter, but
we collect cash in the next quarter.
When did the sale occur?
Was it when we shipped the goods or collected the cash?
And let's say, we buy some equipment in one quarter and
then use it to manufacture Manufactured goods over the next 23 quarters.
When does the expense occur?
When w pay cash to buy the equipment or as we use it over the next 23 quarters?
A lot of what we're going to do in this course is try to figure out what quarter
to put various business activities into when we put together the financial
statements.
So, who makes the rules?
Generally Accepted Accounting Principles or
GAAP are established by the US Congress, but they're usually
too busy trying to do things like investigating steroids in baseball or
figuring out whether they should shut down the US government again.
They don't have time to do accounting standards, so
they delegate to the Securities and Exchange Commission.
But they're often too busy trying to catch the bad guys, so
they don't have time to make the rules.
So they delegate to the Financial Accounting Standards Board or
FASB which is a seven person board in Norwalk,
Connecticut which has the authority to make accounting rules in the US.
They're sometimes they're even too busy to make all the rules.
And so, there's an Emerging Issues Task Force and
the AICPA that can also have a hand in making accounting rules or US GAAP.
Now, this is just in the US.
Internationally, there are International Financial Reporting Standards or IFRS.
They are established by International Accounting Standards Board IASB, which
is based in Wharton and now acquired in over 100 countries including all the EU.
But as of now, US GAAP is still required for US firms.
So basically,
there are two big certificates of accounting standards in the world.
But the good news is for
almost all of the introductory accounting topics that we look in in this course,
there's a very high degree of overlap in the two standards.
>> Why doesn't the US just switch to IFRS?
Do you thing there will ever be one global accounting standard?
>> Actually, in the summer of 2008,
the SEC came out with a roadmap that would move US firms to IFRS by basically now,
but then what happened was Lehman Brothers went bankrupt.
The financial crisis hit and the roadmap dropped way off the SEC's radar screen.
So for the foreseeable future,
we're going to have two big sets of standards in the world, US GAAP and IFRS.
But as I just mentioned,
the good news is the two standards are getting closer to each other all the time.
The FASB and IASB are working together on any new standards.
So, all the stuff that we talk about that's under US GAPP in this course
will be very similar to what you would see under IFRS.
So, who's responsible for financial reporting?
Management is responsible for preparing financial statements.
>> Wait, what?
That is like a professor allowing students to give themselves their own grade.
Everyone gets an A+.
>> Yes, that's correct.
We allow managers to put together their own financial statements,
because they have the most information about what happened in the company and
we hope that they use their discretion in finance reporting to better
communicate their activities.
However, it is important to remember that they may use this discretion to try to
manipulate their perceptions and we need to be on the lookout for
such opportunistic behavior.
So, we put in a number of checks and
balances to try to curb manager's opportunistic behavior.
First, the audit committee and
the board of directors provides oversight of management's accounting process.
However, this is not a foolproof check on manager's behavior.
One of the biggest financial statement funds ever was Enron and
the head of their audit committee was a guy whose full-time job was accounting
professor which means you could put someone like me on the board, and
still have these kinds of problems.
So, then the auditors are hired by the board to express an opinion about whether
the statements are prepared in accordance with GAAP.
This again is not foolproof, because in the case of Enron, their auditor,
Arthur Andersen signed off on some of the more aggressive things they did and
part of the reason was because they were being hired by Enron
to approve their accounting.
If they lost Enron, because of a disagreement over their accounting,
then they would have lost the biggest company in Houston and
would have had to go to the second biggest company in Houston which is exactly.
Who knows what the second biggest company in Houston is?
And that's why they want to make sure to keep Enron.
The next line of defense is the SEC and other regulators who will take action
against the firm if any violations of GAAP or other rules are found.
Now, these bodies tend to be very reactive instead of proactive and
it's often times after someone else has brought the fraud
to the public's attention that they launch their investigation.
So by and large, it's information intermediaries like stock analysts,
institutional investors and the media that provide the biggest check on manager's
behavior by either exposing or fleeing firms with questionable accounting.
But by the time one of these parties get involved, it's a very public issue.
The stock price drops and you're in bad shape if you're an investor or
an employee of the company.
So in the end, the only party that's really going to look out for
your interest in terms of understanding and
trusting financial statements is you which is why it's really important that you
learn some basics in terms of reading financial statements.
So, what are the required financial statements?
Well, there's four of them.
First, there's a balance sheet which gives a company's financial position which gives
its listing of all its resources and obligations on a specific date,
then there's the income statement which provides the results of operations over
a period of time using accrual accounting.
By over a period of time, we mean between two balance sheets.
So, either a quarter or a year.
And by accrual accounting, it means we're going to recognize things in the income
statement based on business activities not based on cash flows,
because we have a separate statement for cash flows, the statement of cash flows
which will give you all the sources and uses of cash over a period of time.
And then finally, there's the statement of stockholder's equity,
which provides changes in stockholder's equity over a period of time.
>> Could we get an example?
This is pretty abstract.
>> Yes, in fact, I have an extended example where we go through a simple
business and see what the different financial statements can tell us about
what is going on at the business, but it takes another ten minutes or so.
So to avoid this being a long first video, why don't we cut it off here and
we'll see you in the next video?
I'll see you then.
>> See you next video.
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