Accountancy (profession) or accounting (methodology) is the measurement, statement, or provision of assurance about financial information primarily used by lenders, managers, investors, tax authorities and other decision makers to make resource allocation decisions between and within companies, organizations, and public agencies. The terms derive from the use of financial accounts.

Accounting is a service activity. Its function is to provide quantitative information primarily financial in nature, about economic entities, that is intended to be useful in making economic decisions, and in making reasoned choices among alternative courses of action.
It is also the discipline of measuring, recording, communicating and interpreting financial activity. Accounting is also widely referred to as the "language of business".

Last January 10-12, 2008 at Fontana Resort Clark Field, Pampanga, the group of Bataan 2020 Managers with their wives, Team Leaders of both mill, staffs, and the President held its annual planning/team bonding/team building with the theme “Accounting for Non-Accountant”.

Many wonder, how it is connected to planning/team bonding/team building or even connecting accounting to engineering. In fact, these gathering will enlighten the group to hub more in the process of accounting. How it will help them decide to their operational action?

To help the team understand accounting, they invited Mr. Larry Tan - a magna cum laude from Chiang Kai Shek College with a degree in Bachelor of Science in Commerce major in Accounting. He placed third in the CPA Board Exam. He joined SGV & Co. as a staff auditor where he conducted financial audit, computer audit & fraud audit for multinational companies. He had a Masters in Business Management at the Asian Institute of Management as an Atlantic, Gulf and Pacific Corp. (AG&P) scholar.

As Mr. Frank C. Evans’ wrote “Too many managers do not have financial background they need to read corporate financial statements and unfortunately, the higher they climb in the corporate hierarchy, the harder it gets to ask for help”.

It is in need a helpful tool to scrutinize all financial report in dealing decision making. At first, most of the attendees only focused on the absolute amount of expenses and earrings, whether the company earned this year or not or simply focused on the higher expenses and try to lessen it. But not taking into consideration that there are other aspects to give attention to like how to measure cost. Traditional cost accounting systems operate on the assumption that producing products and services is what causes costs to occur. For this reason, direct material, direct labour, and other direct cost are assigned to products, and the other costs are grouped as indirect and then allocated among the products that are produced, usually based on some measure of product volume.

In actuality, few manufacturing plants or organizations are as simple or homogeneous as the assumption demands. As product mix and product diversity increase, allocation indirect costs by volume alone may introduce distortions that allow high-volume products to subsidize low-volume products because the high-volume products carry more than their financial fair share of the actual indirect costs that are incurred.

Thanks for the training. It teaches everyone another kind of cost accounting system – Activity Based Costing (ABC). An ABC attempts to trace the cost of each activity as closely as possible to the reason why organizational resources were consumed in support of the necessary activities.

The company is in deed willing to open its door to new technology and technique that will support and improve the paper and tissue manufacturing. Its diversity to help its personnel that even non accountant must ascertain the process of accounting and financing.

Maybe next year, the company will give other very good training and its theme now is “Engineering for Non-engineers”?