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A chart of accounts (COA) is a list of financial accounts and reference numbers, grouped into categories, such as assets, liabilities, equity, revenue and expenses, and used for recording transactions in the organization's general ledger.
The chart of accounts is the table of contents of the general ledger. Totaling of all debits and credits in the general ledger at the end of a financial period is known as trial balance . "Daybooks" or journals are used to list every single transaction that took place during the day, and the list is totaled at the end of the day.
The accounting equation is the mathematical structure of the balance sheet. Although a general ledger appears to be fairly simple, in large or complex organizations or organizations with various subsidiaries, the general ledger can grow to be quite large and take several hours or days to audit or balance.
In banking and accounting, the balance is the amount of money owed (or due) on an account. In bookkeeping, "balance" is the difference between the sum of debit entries and the sum of credit entries entered into an account during a financial period. [1] When total debits exceed the total credits, the account indicates a debit balance.
However, due to the fact that accounting is kept on a historical basis, the equity is typically not the net worth of the organization. Often, a company may depreciate capital assets in 5–7 years, meaning that the assets will show on the books as less than their "real" value, or what they would be worth on the secondary market.
Cost may include the cost of borrowing to finance construction if this policy is consistently adopted. The historical cost is then depreciated: it is systematically reduced to the recoverable amount, over the estimated useful life of the asset, to reflect the asset's usage. The depreciation (reduction of historical cost) is charged to expense. [5]
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The accounting equation is a statement of equality between the debits and the credits. The rules of debit and credit depend on the nature of an account. For the purpose of the accounting equation approach, all the accounts are classified into the following five types: assets, capital, liabilities, revenues/incomes, or expenses/losses.