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d for accountants. Consequently, the demand for accountants is generally much greater than the supply. Government official often have a legal background: similarly, the men and women in management often have a background in accounting. They are usually familiar with the methodology of finance and fundamentals of fiscal and business administration. Today’s accountants are as diverse as their job assignments. Accountants may be male or female, outgoing or conservative, but they are all analytical. They may have backgrounds in art history or puter programming. They e from every ethnic and cultural background.The accounting backgrounds can open doors to most lines of business. In short, accounting deals with all facets of an organization —purchasing, manufacturing, marketing, and distribution. This is why accounting provides such an excellent basis for business experience. Accounting is an information system necessitated by the great plexity of modern business. The functions of accountingOne of the most important functions of accounting is to accumulate and report financial information that shows an organization’s financial position and the results of its operations to its interested users. These users include managers, stockholders, banks and other creditors, governmental agencies, investment advisors, and the general public. For example, stockholders must have an organization’s financial information in order to measure its management’s performance and to evaluate their own holdings. Banks and other creditors must consider the financial strength of a business before permitting it to borrow funds. Potential investors need financial data in order to pare prospective investments. Also many laws require that extensive financial information be reported to the various levels of government. Businesses usually publish such reports at least annually. To meet the needs of the external users, a framework of accounting standards, principles and procedures known as “generally accepted accounting principles” have been developed to insure the relevance and reliability of the accounting information contained in these external financial reports. The subdivision of the accounting process that produces these external reports is referred to as financial accounting.Another important function of accounting is to provide the management inside an organization with the accounting information needed in the organization’s internal decisionmaking, which relates to planning, control, and evaluation within an organization. For example, budgets are prepared under the directions of a pany’s controller on an annual basis and express the desires and goals of the pany’s management. A performance report is supplied to help a manager focus his attention on problems or opportunities that might otherwise go unnoticed. Furthermore, costbenefit data will be needed by a pany’s management in deciding among the alternatives of reducing prices, increasing advertising, or doing both in attempt to maintain its market shares. The process of generating and analyzing such accounting information for internal decision –making is often referred to as managerial accounting and the related information reports being prepared are called internal management reports. As contrasted with financial accounting, a management accounting information system provides both historical and estimated information that is relevant to the specific plans on more frequent basis. And managerial accounting is not govern