tailieunhanh - ACCOUNTING PATTERNS

Governments in developing countries need to spend more money on essential public services if they are to have a serious impact on poverty. Take the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), a set of targets for halving extreme poverty, providing universal primary education, halting the spread of HIV and AIDS and much more by 2015. Ambitious, yes, but achievable. To meet many of the MDGs, governments will need to hire more public sector employees, from teachers and doctors to agricultural extension workers. For example, it is estimated that 18 million new teachers will be needed between 2004 and 2015 to achieve universal primary education. As for healthcare, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that there is a global shortage of . | Accounting Patterns Perhaps it s just the way my career has worked out but accounting systems of one kind or another have been an overriding theme for me. From my first project as a consultant through to projects as I m involved with now now twelve years on I ve taken part in laying out accouting systems. By accounting system I don t mean necessarily the classical accounting systems such as General Lendger Accounts Recievable or Accounts Payable. Rather I mean any system that responds to business events by figuring out the financial consequences of the event. So my examples have included utility billing and payroll. But the patterns I ve seen and described here don t just apply to money. These patterns can apply to things other than money. You can see this in utility billing and payroll where kilowatt hours of electricity or hours of people s time are accounted for with the same patterns that track and manipulate the money. One associate of mine used several of these patterns building a system to track gas in a large gas pipeline. Over those years I ve tried hard to understand better what the patterns are and how they relate to each other. At this point in time I see the fundamental picture as reacting to an event to produce accounting entries. Figure A meaningless but hopefully suggestive cartoon indicating that the role of accounting is to take business events and produce appropriate accounting entries. The boundaries are in essence fairly simple things. An Event 11 describes something that happens that is interesting to the business. This may be a sale the recognition that a cusotmer has used 52 kwh of electricity or that an employee has been promoted. The Accounting Entry 15 records the consequences of this event for the thing that we are tracking. For most of my examples these are financial consequences but they might be something else. So a customer using 52 kwh of electricity leads to a charge where they owe US money as well as a charge indicating that .