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What is Accounting Profit?

Decent Essays

Based on my understanding, accounting profit is a measure of the profit or loss of the
Company. It’s simply, total income minus total cost.

I agree that accounting profit provides a good starting point to evaluate a company’s performance during a particular period. Many people tend to assume a company is doing well if it is profitable and invest in it as long as income statement shows net profit without considering other indicators such as accounting ratios and cash flows. However, I am unsure how reliable it is in indicating a company’s true profitability.

Accounting profit figure may not be comparable between companies due to the subjectivity involved in management estimates and accounting policies. For example, amortisation, valuation and fair value adjustments are subjective. Additionally, creative accounting may also cause profits to be managed and inflated. For an example, Starbucks avoid paying tax in the UK for 3 years.

Accounting profit also do not take into consideration all cost, such as opportunity cost of cost of equity. A company with high equity may report a higher accounting profit than a similar company with higher debt.

Therefore, I highly doubt if accounting profit can be considered as a measure of true profit.

Part 2

Accounting in Context (AIC) module cleared my doubts I had in Part 1 of this essay. AIC gave me a clearer picture of profit and accounting as a whole. Profit is the outcome of a particular accounting rule and not just a

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