Audit, also referred to as accountancy, is the procedure of recording and handling information about economic entities, such as services and corporations. Accounting determines the results of a company's economic activities and conveys this details to a selection of stakeholders, including financiers, lenders, administration, and regulatory authorities. Professionals of bookkeeping are known as accountants. The terms "accounting" and "monetary coverage" are frequently used reciprocally. Audit can be split into numerous fields including economic bookkeeping, administration accountancy, tax accounting and price bookkeeping. Monetary accountancy concentrates on the reporting of an organization's monetary details, consisting of the prep work of monetary declarations, to the exterior customers of the details, such as investors, regulators and vendors. Monitoring bookkeeping concentrates on the measurement, analysis and coverage of information for inner usage by monitoring to enhance service operations. The recording of monetary transactions, to make sure that summaries of the financials might exist in monetary reports, is called accounting, of which double-entry bookkeeping is one of the most typical system. Audit information systems are developed to sustain accounting functions and related activities. Accountancy has existed in various forms and levels of class throughout human history. The double-entry audit system in use today was developed in medieval Europe, particularly in Venice, and is usually credited to the Italian mathematician and Franciscan friar Luca Pacioli. Today, accountancy is assisted in by accounting organizations such as standard-setters, accountancy firms and specialist bodies. Financial statements are typically investigated by accounting companies, and are prepared based on usually approved audit concepts (GAAP). GAAP is set by various standard-setting organizations such as the Financial Accounting Criteria Board (FASB) in the USA and the Financial Reporting Council in the UK. As of 2012, "all major economic situations" have strategies to converge in the direction of or embrace the International Financial Coverage Standards (IFRS).
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