ACW1200 Semester 1 2019: Accounting's Role in Personal Life and Career

This essay delves into the multifaceted role of accounting, emphasizing its significance in both personal and professional spheres. It begins by defining accounting and its various branches, laying the groundwork for a reflective analysis of its practical applications. The essay explores how accounting principles, such as tracking income and expenses, budgeting, and financial planning, empower individuals to make informed decisions about investments, manage personal finances, and plan for the future. Furthermore, it highlights accounting's crucial role in small business operations, including profit and loss tracking and capital management. The essay then transitions to the career implications of accounting, emphasizing its importance in measuring financial health, profitability, and business growth. It cites statistics on the growing demand for accountants and the promising career prospects within the field, concluding that accounting offers a stable and rewarding career path while also providing valuable tools for personal financial management.

Introduction
Accounting may be defined as the measurement and sharing of the financial information about the
entity, business or even individuals. It is often used as a synonym to financial reporting and helps in
decision making by the relevant stakeholders. Accounting is a wide field and can be divided into a
number of categories like management accounting, tax accounting, financial accounting, cost accounting
and external accounting (Alexander, 2016).
Reflective Analysis
Accounting is not only critical and significant for companies but it also helps a great deal in personal life
as well as in shaping the future and career. It helps in managing the personal finances and making
decision about the investments. Accounting helps in tracking the income and expenses of an individual
and what are the different heads of expenses, which is again helpful in financial planning and analysis of
the expenses and controlling and reducing them in the long run. It helps to take decision between the
trade-off between the savings and the investments (Heminway, 2017). It also helps in making the
estimate of future streams of incomes from different sources and how the same is to be spent.
Furthermore, in case an individual is running a small business on his own, then accounting helps in
tracking the profit, losses, sales, etc. for the business and determining what is the amount of debt
capital and own capital in the overall capital of the business. It also helps in calculating the rate of return
in the business and thereby taking decision on whether to stay in the business or exit or what are
measures of improvement that can be implemented. Some of the very common uses of accounting in
the everyday lives are like it helps in reconciling and thereby ensuring that all the charges or expenses or
incomes are correctly recorded. It helps in managing and budgeting and planning for the spending.
Accounting also helps in planning for the future and thereby managing resources as contingencies for
the future. It helps in benchmarking and setting the targets and then comparing the actuals with the
same to establish the reason for the variances (Linden & Freeman, 2017).
Last but not the least, accounting also helps in shaping the future and thereby career as a whole.
Accounting is often considered to be the backbone and lifeblood of any organization or business as it
helps in measuring the financial health, profitability and growth of the business as a whole. As per the
Bureau of Labor Statistics, it has been found that the career in accounting is 11% faster than the in other
professions. Since it is the integral part of any business, the demand for accountants never goes down,
thus it can be said that the person pursuing a career in accounting, it is certain to find the job as well as
with the good earning capacity (Choy, 2018).
Conclusion
From the above discussion, it can be said that accounting is one of most promising careers to pursue
considering the use and returns that it has to offer. Furthermore, it also helps in managing the personal
finances a lot and thereby helping in daily lives.

References
Alexander, F. (2016). The Changing Face of Accountability. The Journal of Higher Education, 71(4), 411-
431.
Choy, Y. K. (2018). Cost-benefit Analysis, Values, Wellbeing and Ethics: An Indigenous Worldview
Analysis. Ecological Economics, 2(1), 145. Retrieved from
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2017.08.005
Heminway, J. (2017). Shareholder Wealth Maximization as a Function of Statutes, Decisional Law, and
Organic Documents. SSRN, 5(2), 1-35.
Linden, B., & Freeman, R. (2017). Profit and Other Values: Thick Evaluation in Decision Making. Business
Ethics Quarterly, 27(3), 353-379. doi:https://doi.org/10.1017/beq.2017.1