Traditional accounting conventions

Abstract

We have looked at some of the possible things that financial accountants could do in order to provide useful figures to people about their resources. We have looked at who the users are, and what sort of information they might want. In this and the following chapters we look at what accountants usually do do. Many different words are used in textbooks, articles and statements to describe these ideas — concepts, conventions, assumptions, postulates for example. Some of them are described as being more ‘fundamental’ than the others. In this chapter we shall simply refer to all of them as ‘conventions’. Later in Part Three (Chapter 17) we shall look at how the accounting bodies define and divide them, but here we concentrate on the ideas themselves.