ABSTRACT
All businesses need to record the financial details of their external trading transactions (for example, sales and purchases) so that they at least know who owes them money and what money they owe – this is also useful at a personal level but is normally on a much simplified scale. However, this very detailed level of ‘accounting for the business’ is only one aspect of financial involvement in business management and is not the main area of emphasis for this book. In any commercial operation there is a continual need to make decisions. This consequently requires converting a multitude of totally different resources into some common system of measurement or currency so that meaningful comparisons between alternatives can be made and, therefore, sound decisions taken.
