Accounting principles
●Consistency:
- means the uniformity of accounting procedures and policies used by a business from period to period to promote comparability.
●Materiality:
- is a threshold quality that is demanded of all information in the financial statements. financial statements should separately disclose items that are significant ( material) enough to affect decisions made by users. ( a company’s sale of $1,000 compared to total sale of 10,000 and 100,000)
- The understandability (clarity) of the financial statements is improved if only significant(material) items are included.
●Substance over form:
- The economic substance of a transaction should be recorded rather than simply
its legal form.
E.g. A consolidated financial statement for a group company is in compliance with substance over form concept.
Problems of achieving a balance between the qualitative characteristics:
Conflicts:
●Relevance and timeless
- If financial statements are to be tailored to the needs of each individual users, then they will take longer to prepare.
●Understandability and completeness
- If all aspects of the business are to be shown, this may make the financial statements less comprehensive.
●Relevance and reliability
- Sometimes the information that is most relevant is not the most reliable or vice versa.
In such conflicts, the information that is most relevant of information that is reliable
should be used.
●Neutrality and prudence
- Neutrality requires information to be free of deliberate or systematic bias while
Prudence is a potentially biased concept towards not overstating gains or assets or understating losses or liabilities.
- Neutrality and prudence are reconciled by finding a balance that ensures that the
Deliberate and systematic overstatement of assets and gains and understatement of losses and liabilities do not occur.
，我們將會(huì)及時(shí)處理。