Accounting has been defined as, by Professor of Accounting at the University of Michigan William A Paton as having one base function: \"facilitating the administration of economic activity. This function has two closely attendant phases: 1) measuring and arraying economic data; and 2) communicating the results of this process to interested parties.\"

As an example, a company's accountants periodically measure the acquire and loss for a month, a quarter or a fiscal year and publish these results in a evidence of acquire and loss that's titled an income statement.  These statements include elements such as accounts receivable (what's owed to the company) and accounts payable (what the consort owes). It can also get pretty complicated with subjects like retained earnings and accelerated depreciation. This at the higher levels of accounting and in the organization.

Much of accounting though, is also concerned with base bookkeeping. This is the process that records every transaction; every bill paid, every dime owed, every note and cent spent and accumulated.

But the owners of the company, which can be individual owners or millions of shareholders are most concerned with the summaries of these transactions, contained in the financial statement. The financial evidence summarizes a company's assets. A value of an asset is what it cost when it was first acquired. The financial evidence also records what the sources of the assets were. Some assets are in the form of loans that have to be paying back. Profits are also an asset of the business.

In what's titled double-entry bookkeeping, the liabilities are also summarized. Obviously, a consort wants to show a higher amount of assets to equilibrize the liabilities and show a profit. The management of these two elements is the essence of accounting.

There is a system for doing this; not every consort or individual can devise their own systems for accounting; the result would be chaos!