Posts by accountinator

I recently published this article with my colleagues Drs. Abraham Fried and Aliza Rotenstein about revenue recognition for gift cards in Journal of Accountancy: Lost and found.
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Accounting information is material if its omission or misstatement would mislead investors. In other words, if there’s a piece of information that investors need to know, then that information is material – it makes a difference. Information can be material in size or importance. In size, materiality is all about the amount. A large amount of […]
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In accounting, information has confirmatory value when it helps users to confirm or adjust prior expectations. But why is confirmatory value an important attribute for accounting information to have? The importance of confirmatory value People read accounting financial statements in order to create predictions about the future. They want to predict future dividends and that the company […]
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Accounting information is relevant (“accounting relevance”) when it is capable of making a difference in a decision. Suppose that you’re trying to decide what to eat for dinner: A hamburger? Or a salad? What information is relevant to your decision? The price of each meal, perhaps. And consider the number of calories, too. Do you have […]
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In accounting, information has predictive value when you can use it to form expectations about the future. Using the future to predict the past How should investors make decisions about loaning money to a company, or investing in its stock? High quality accounting information helps investors to make these decisions. When you think about it, investors really want […]
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The economic entity assumption is one of four assumptions underlying financial statements. It says that you can identify economic activity with a particular unit of accountability. Put another way, the economic entity assumptions says that certain transactions are “inside” a business, while other transactions are “outside” of the business. Suppose that you run a candy […]
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