Learning Basic Accounting as an International Hotel Management Student

Halo teman-teman, saya Deasy Kania Rhamadhanti C, mahasiswa Institut Pariwisata Trisakti sekaligus Awardee dari Beasiswa Unggulan Kemendikbud. Tulisan ini merupakan cara saya memberikan bacaan dan informasi yang dapat dimanfaatkan bagi teman-teman semua. Selamat Membaca!

As i enrolled to this course, the beginning lessons was about learning to analyze financial statements. Financial statement analysis is the process of analyzing a company's financial statements for decision-making purposes. External stakeholders use it to understand the overall health of an organization and to evaluate financial performance and business value. Internal constituents use it as a monitoring tool for managing the finances.

Learning financial statement analysis evaluates a company's performance or value through a company's balance sheet, income statement, or statement of cash flows. By using a number of techniques, such as horizontal, vertical, or ratio analysis, investors may develop a more nuanced picture of a company's financial profile. The financial statements of a company record important financial data on every aspect of a business's activities. As such, they can be evaluated on the basis of past, current, and projected performance.

Several techniques are commonly used as part of financial statement analysis. Three of the most important techniques are horizontal analysis, vertical analysis, and ratio analysis. Horizontal analysis compares data horizontally, by analyzing values of line items across two or more years. Vertical analysis looks at the vertical effects that line items have on other parts of the business and the business's proportions. Ratio analysis uses important ratio metrics to calculate statistical relationships.

As the course goes on, the lessons started to deep dive into accounting. Accounting is well known as the process of recording financial transactions pertaining to a business. The accounting process includes summarizing, analyzing, and reporting these transactions to oversight agencies, regulators, and tax collection entities. There are several elements & liabilities in accounting that I've learned. Those elements are Assets, Liabilities, Owners Equity, Capital Introduced, Drawings, Revenue and Expenses. Assets itself is something that has been owned which provides a future economic benefit. For example, Physical Assets such as land, buildings, vehicles, equipment, furniture etc. There are also assets that refers to as an intangible assets. Typically these are much harder to put a value on because intangible assets are something that will generate a significant future cash stream. difference between assets and liabilities represents the owners interest in the business. 

Revenues is known as gross inflows of economic benefit during an accounting period in the course of the ordinary activities of an entity, such as sales, income from provision of services, funds paid from others for use of an entities assets, interest received. Remember for each of these items it is only revenue in a period to the extent it relates to that time period. lastly, expenses is decreases in owners equity because of the use of assets or increasing liabilities. But only to the extent that it is in the course of producing income for the current period.

As I learned about elements and liabilities of accounting, I also learned about how bookkeeping works when it comes to debit and credit. debit entry increases an asset or expense account. A debit also decreases a liability or equity account. Thus, a debit indicates money coming into an account. In terms of recordkeeping, debits are always recorded on the left side, as a positive number to reflect incoming money. Understanding the definition of an account in accounting terms is important. An account has many different applications in finance, and its usage and terminology can differ. An accounting system tracks the financial activities of a specific asset, liability, equity, revenue or expense. There will be record of each individual account in a ledger and use this information to prepare for financial statements. Records increase and decrease as accounting transactions occur, and this movement represents the diametrical relationship between debits and credits. I also learned about Fill in and review accounting documents. Accounting documents and document records regroup every document that plays a role in the preparation of financial statements for a company, like income statements and balance sheets. They include records of monetary transactions, assets and liabilities, ledgers, journals, etc.

They also contain details of business transactions. When transactions are made, they're supposed to record the key information about transactions, like the names, the amounts paid, the date and the significance of the transactions. They each (source documents) have a number that identifies them in the accounting system. It simplifies the understanding of records and helps figure whether there are any documents missing or not, as, once they have been recorded in the system, they are indexed to be easily accessible and archived. Furthermore, they are essential for and to auditors, who utilize them as proof that payments actually happened and proof for companies' owners.

After finishing the course, I learned so much about basic accounting. There's a lot of important work that needs to be understand by people who choose to work in managing company in general.

Sekian dari pembahasan saya mengenai Learning Basic Accounting as an International Hotel Management Student. Saya harap tulisan ini dapat bermanfaat bagi teman-teman semua dan jangan ragu-ragu untuk memberikan kritik dan saran mengenai artikel ini. Terima kasih, salam Kompasiana!