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What are Basic Accounting Principles and Guidelines? Please define in your own words.
There are many accounting principles but most important are below
Since GAAP is founded on the basic accounting principles and guidelines, we can better understand GAAP if we understand those accounting principles. The following is a list of the ten main accounting principles and guidelines together with a highly condensed explanation of each.
1. Economic Entity Assumption
The accountant keeps all of the business transactions of a sole proprietorship separate from the business owner's personal transactions. For legal purposes, a sole proprietorship and its owner are considered to be one entity, but for accounting purposes they are considered to be two separate entities.
2. Monetary Unit Assumption
Economic activity is measured in U.S. dollars, and only transactions that can be expressed in U.S. dollars are recorded.
Because of this basic accounting principle, it is assumed that the dollar's purchasing power has not changed over time. As a result accountants ignore the effect of inflation on recorded amounts. For example, dollars from a transaction are combined (or shown) with dollars from a transaction.
3. Time Period Assumption
This accounting principle assumes that it is possible to report the complex and ongoing activities of a business in relatively short, distinct time intervals such as the five months ended May,, or the5 weeks ended May1,. The shorter the time interval, the more likely the need for the accountant to estimate amounts relevant to that period. For example, the property tax bill is received on December of each year. On the income statement for the year ended December,, the amount is known; but for the income statement for the three months ended March,, the amount was not known and an estimate had to be used.
