Early portions of this textbook dealt mostly with financial accounting. Financial accounting is concerned with reporting to external parties such as owners, analysts, and creditors. These external users rarely have access to the information that is internal to the organization, nor do they specify the exact information that will be presented. Instead, they must rely on the general reports presented by the company. Therefore, the reporting structure is well defined and standardized. The methods of preparation and the reports presented are governed by rules of various standard-setting organizations. Furthermore, the external users generally see only the summarized or aggregated data for an entity
