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subilas
Feb 25, 2008, 02:11 PM
Is there any difference between Accounts and Finance.

morgaine300
Feb 27, 2008, 06:13 PM
If you mean Accounting and Finance, yes! I'm an accountant, and except for time value of money stuff, I pretty much despise finance. :p

I might have a hard time writing this well to help distinguish them and hopefully other people will jump in on this as well. There are some cross-over areas and I could even see some differences of opinion on that. So there are areas I'd say are not very clear cut. It also depends on what kind of accounting. Just for instance, finance is used more in cost accounting.

An over-simplified definition might be to say that accounting is keeping track of and reporting all the numbers, and that finance is analyzing the numbers, including analyzing possible future numbers.

I'm a financial accountant. So for instance, I would take all the transactions that happened during a year and put those together to make the financial statements for the outside users. (i.e. Income Statement, Balance Sheet) A finance person could take those statements and start analyzing them. They could, for instance, work in investing, analyzing statements and other factors to see how well a company is doing and their prospects for the future. (There's even cross-over in that, but I'm trying to keep it simple.)

Finance can also involve things like making decisions about capital investments, etc.

To do finance, one must know a certain amount about accounting, like how to read those financial statements. And accountants do some finance stuff also.

What you need now is an answer from a finance person's point of view, because since I don't do that, and don't like most of it, I don't know the subject well enough. Just as a person deep into finance wouldn't know as much detail about what accounting can actual involve.