50 Accounting Quotes That Are Worth Reading

By Norbert Juma

Master quote curator and editor on a mission to inspire

Published April 21, 2023

If you are in search of accounting quotes, we have something to share with you.

We have created a compilation of the best accounting quotes that are relevant and popular.

You can understand the importance of accounting for a business or individual by going through these quotes.

In addition to the sayings, we have also discussed accounting, its types, and regulatory bodies.

So, if you are interested, please continue reading.

Accounting Explained

Accounting is a business language, which is referred to as a process of measuring, identifying, and communicating financial information.

This information is collected regarding a business organization and shared with its stakeholders, such as:

Investors
Creditors
Managers
Regulators

Accounting plays a critical role when it comes to managing or regulating a business.

With the provision of information about an organization’s financial situation, all the stakeholders can make an informed decision.

For instance, investors look at the financial statements of a business to analyze its growth pattern and profitability ratio.

Managers rely on accounting information to control, monitor, and plan the performance of a business model.

In addition, creditors can evaluate the creditworthiness of a business by looking at its accounting information.

Branches of Accounting

There are two main branches of accounting: Financial Accounting and Managerial Accounting.

Financial Accounting

This type of accounting involves the preparation of financial statements.

These statements are meant for external users like regulators and investors.

Financial statements consist of the following documents:

Balance sheet
Income statement
Statement of cash flows

All these documents summarize and offer necessary information regarding a business’s performance, financial position, and cash flow.

Managerial Accounting

Managerial accounting is associated with collecting and presenting financial information used for decision-making.

It includes the preparation of different documents such as:

Budgets
Forecasts
Cost analyses
Performance reports

With the help of this information, managers can make key decisions regarding product pricing, financing, and investments.

Accounting Guidelines

Accounting is guided by a wide array of standards and principles created by professional bodies.

Two of the major regulatory bodies related to accounting are as under:

Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB)
International Accounting Standards Board (IASB)

Following the guidelines provided by these bodies ensures consistency, comparability, and transparency in terms of financial reporting.

Evolution of Accounting

Apart from traditional methods of accounting, this field is rapidly evolving due to the introduction of the latest technologies.

These include:

Cloud computing
Artificial intelligence
Blockchain

With the help of these technologies, accounting firms are transforming their techniques of collecting, analyzing, and processing accounting information.

You will also enjoy our article on small business quotes.

Top 10 Accounting Quotes

These are the best accounting quotes to check out from our list.

1. “I don’t really enjoy finance and accounting.” — Holly Branson

2. “Mark-to-market accounting is like crack. Don’t do it.” — Andrew Fastow

3. “I actually studied accounting in college. So I’m a CPA.” — Stacy Brown-Philpot

4. “If you want an accounting of your worth, count your friends.” — Mary Browne

5. “Accounting was the course that helped me more than anything.” — Julian Robertson

6. “Almost all decisions based on cost accounting are utterly wrong.” — Eliyahu Goldratt

7. “I don’t know technology and engineering. I don’t know accounting.” — Bernard Ebbers

8. “Capital isn’t this pile of money sitting somewhere; it’s an accounting construct.” — Bethany McLean

9. “I have an accounting degree and a law degree and had never really used either.” — Cris Collinsworth

10. “How many couples do you know who met over accounting books in a Starbucks?” — David Schweikert

Accounting Quotes that Offer Useful Tips

The following accounting quotes are filled with useful tips and wise words.

11. “There’s no business like show business, but there are several businesses like accounting.” — David Letterman

12. “There is nothing wrong with good accounting, except that it does not necessarily lead to good science.” — Gerhard Herzberg

13. “There are no accounting issues, no trading issues, no reserve issues, no previously unknown problem issues.” — Kenneth Lay

14. “Balanced budget requirements seem more likely to produce accounting ingenuity than genuinely balanced budgets.” — Thomas Sowell

15. “Accounting rules give financial institutions flexibility about when they choose to recognize venture capital profits.” — Alex Berenson

16. “Life as we know it, with all its ups and downs, will soon be over. We all will give an accounting to God of how we have lived.” — William Wilberforce

17. “Don’t ever let your business get ahead of the financial side of your business. Accounting, accounting, accounting. Know your numbers.” — Tilman J. Fertitta

18. “Accounting does not make corporate earnings or balance sheets more volatile. Accounting just increases the transparency of volatility in earnings.” — Diane Garnick

19. “Every generation inherits a world it never made, and, as it does so, it automatically becomes the trustee of that world for those who come after. In due course, each generation makes its own accounting to its children.” — Robert Kennedy

20. “Your own business growth and success depends on many things, and along that growing path, you are going to have to concede certain responsibilities and activities – whether for your accounting, your production, or day-to-day management.” — Michael Gerber

Check out our collection of logistics quotes if you enjoy this article.

Accounting Quotes that Showcase Real-Life Experiences

This section features inspiring accounting quotes that bring real-life experiences to light, offering valuable insights into the profession.

21. “I studied finance and accounting in college, and I worked at a massive accounting firm out of graduation.” — Simu Liu

22. “The scriptures make the danger of delay clear. It is that we may discover that we have run out of time. The God who gives us each day as a treasure will require an accounting.” — Henry B. Eyring

23. “Probably the best advice I ever got in my life was from the head of the accounting department, Mr. Hutchinson, I believe, at the Glidden Company in Chicago, and he told me, You really aren’t cut out for accounting.” — Bob Newhart

24. “I was never a Certified Public Accountant… I just had a degree in accounting. The reason I was never a Certified Public Accountant was because it would require passing a test, which I would not have been able to do.” — Unknown

25. “When I graduated from college, I tried my hardest to get a job at an accounting firm, and it just wasn’t meant to be. I ended up delivering pizzas and newspapers. I knew my life was cracked up to be a little more.” — Ronnie Coleman

26. “This Department of Treasury, run by this administration, using the same tried and true accounting methods that every business in America uses, cast new light on the fiscal severity that our Nation is facing, what some would call a mess.” — Jim Costa

27. “What you get out of an M.B.A. programme, no matter how much experience, is functional tools and understanding in disciplines: you’ll understand economics, you’ll understand marketing, finance, accounting. That, M.B.A. programmes do very well.” — Henry Mintzberg

28. “Jobs offshoring began with manufacturing, but the rise of the high-speed Internet made it possible to move offshore tradable professional skills, such as software engineering, information technology, various forms of engineering, architecture, accounting, and even the medical reading of MRIs and CT-Scans.” — Paul Craig Roberts

29. “A record company used to be a very good thing, but they ended up soul-destroyingly trapping people in the accounting department. And you couldn’t get any further, and the heads of each department were changing all the time, so you couldn’t have any permanent relationship within the corporation.” — John Lydon

30. “When you’ve got African parents, you go to uni, do finance, and go into accounting. But I’m not good with systems. I dropped out in my final year of college to become a Christian poet. Then went back to do my A-levels and went to uni in Birmingham to do political science and theology. I lasted 12 weeks.” — Michaela Coel

Accounting Quotes Related to Business

The following accounting quotes are directly related to business and policies.

31. “The Glassco Commission was really not interested in good science. It was interested in good accounting.” — Gerhard Herzberg

32. “I’m a good learner. I can dig in. I knew nothing about mark-to-market accounting when I started the ‘Enron’ film.” — Alex Gibney

33. “Developing safe products for people around the world will mean accounting for a much wider variety of devices, networks, infrastructure, and political environments.” — Alex Stamos

34. “We must investigate without fear or favor the so-called ‘accounting irregularities’ that cause turmoil in the markets and wipe billions off the investments of ordinary South Africans.” — Cyril Ramaphosa

35. “While expanding market access for American industry, financial markets, and farmers is critical, I believe it needs to be done responsibly, accounting for the treatment and protection of workers and the environment.” — Mark Udall

36. “Housing has led our nation’s economic expansion over the past few years, accounting for 16 percent of our Gross Domestic Product. New housing starts and home sales hit record levels from 2003 through 2005.” — Randy Neugebauer

37. “Home base is the support system where we have a culinary team, my own writers because of the shows and the books and stuff; we have a culinary team of about six people. Marketing, public relations, accounting and all that sort of stuff.” — Emeril Lagasse

38. “It was the king’s army, the king’s people, the king’s taxes; and he who questioned the propriety of the royal prerogative of taking from his people without return or accounting, was reckoned, and felt himself to be, a criminal, guilty of the highest crime of disloyalty.” — John Buchanan Robinson

39. “The Macau casinos have a wonderful business; it’s taking in money from Chinese businessmen elsewhere who send it through junky companies to casinos to gamble. The growth continues, and they have basically western managers and western accounting, so we trust the numbers a little bit more.” — James Chanos

40. “If the U.S. Government were a company, the deficit would be $5 trillion because they would have to account by generally accepted accounting principles. But actually, they encourage government spending, reckless government spending because the government can issue Treasury bills at extremely low-interest rates.” — Marc Faber

More Accounting Quotes and Sayings

These are some more accounting quotes with several themes.

41. “In the tradition of national income accounting, economic policymakers have typically focused on variables such as income, wealth, and consumption.” — Ben Bernanke

42. “You can’t make a manager have a coach he doesn’t want. I can’t make the head of the accounting department work with someone he doesn’t want.” — Jerry Reinsdorf

43. “My philosophy is not a bean-counting, accounting ‘look at this.’ It is a philosophy that smaller government is better government, and government that is closer to the people is best of all.” — John Bolton

44. “Every quarter, we need to see the portfolio and follow the accounting practice of mark-to-market that values investments according to the prevailing market prices and at the price at which they are made.” — Chanda Kochhar

45. “The revenue stream for Social Security benefits comes from payroll taxes, which are credited to the Social Security Trust Fund – accounting for the program’s finances separately from the rest of the budget.” — Jerome Powell

46. “You have various institutions like law firms and accounting firms which bill by the hour. I’m really against that. You have the incentive to go slowly, be there as long as possible, to over-research things and over-staff.” — Robert Pozen

47. “There are tens of thousands of bank branches and 4,000 currency chests. We need to be careful and try that this is a number which is not a mere estimate but a verified number both physically and in the accounting sense.” — Urjit Patel

48. “Hunted for sport by the rich, then driven from large tracts of its natural habitat by agricultural and housing development, the giant panda deserves better than to be scrubbed from conservation’s ledger books through false accounting.” — John Burnside

49. “It is crucial that we develop real awareness of ourselves as citizens of Earth, linked by mutual and indissoluble bonds. When we clearly recognize this reality and ground ourselves in it, we are compelled to take a strict accounting of our way of life.” — Daisaku Ikeda

50. “Enron had already collapsed and filed for bankruptcy protection by the beginning of 2002. But despite complaints from short sellers that corporations had used accounting gimmickry to inflate their profits, many investors thought the crisis at Enron was an isolated case.” — Alex Berenson