A WAY OF VIEWING BUSINESS

I am sure everyone of us has been surrounded by lots of news about airlines as the event of Malaysian Airlines MH370 has been developed recently. For me, it is enough for me to do more study about El Al for now. Let me switch to something else more general - "A WAY OF VIEWING BUSINESS".

When I first enrolled in this accounting subject, I was like "Cool, I'm good with numbers so this should be easy peasy for me". And, few weeks later, how wrong am I?. Not much of dealing with numbers at all in this subject. And even when I was meant to go through the financial data of annual reports, I fell distracted.

Reading through the article " A way of viewing business", its interesting introduction has drawn my curiosity on what this article is all about. "What is accounting?" "Is accounting a game?" etc.

I really like the comparison the author quoted about accounting and a camera. I used to think accounting is what it is - record of accounts. Everything in accounting is guidelines, fixated and precise as a picture captured by a camera. Accounting is not just that. It is a "business model" and "an abstraction of business activities". As accounting is the backbone of any businesses, this explains why many directors and CEOs have background in accounting.

There are great examples about mixtures of businesses in a local area (Yeppoon) in the articles. What was the author's purpose in listing out so many small businesses in his local area? Businesses are creating values and exchange values with others businesses and add values to consumers. As a "soon-to-be" property developer, I now understand and it all makes sense to me why so many small businesses would like to open their shops near Woolworths or Coles or IGAs. Why? Because, in order to run a successful business, you have to understand the market, businesses around the local neighborhood and most of importantly, be on top of the numbers such as potential traffic flows, population, demographics etc. These essentially drives a business to improve and increase on revenues. Few years ago, I was involved in a small development project which we proposed a 1,500m2 shopping village. The block of land had 3 frontages. We approached IGA to open its business there in order to attract more smaller businesses such as bakeries, newsagencies, chemists, florists, liquor stores etc. The aim was to create a local small shopping village which all retail tenants benefits from each other and supports each others to be successful.

This article in particular and this accounting subject in general has helped me in thinking outside the square. What I used to do up to this point is read and summarize. Perhaps I have now found a new process which I enjoy: reading, thinking, analyzing and making comments. This process have helped me become a bit more analytical. So how to I approach new concepts from now on? I would definitely try to relate new concepts, new ideas to something closer to me, something around me in order to grasp a better understanding. "Accounting is not about number, it is an abstraction of business activities".