Reviews the book "The Evolution of the Budgetary Concept in the Federal Government," edited by Catheryn Seckler-Hudson.

Accounting is not a science; it is an art. The general ledger of an accounting system is a picture of a business enterprise in action, but it is not a photographic picture. Rather it is cubistic or surrealistic, and therefore symbolical in nature. It visualizes, for the management and others, one link in the chain of economic activity whereby man makes his living. Put all accounting systems together in a chain, and the totality of economic effort would spread like a mighty mural before our eyes. There sometimes is a look about the eyes of accountants that has mistakenly been compared with the cold stare of a fish. It does not come from eye strain from unemotionally looking too hard at figures. Instead, it comes from mentally seeing far-off places and far-off activities. For accountants look with an inner eye at commerce and industry-a scene which is one of the mightiest and most complex to be viewed by man. The accountant can glimpse the whole panorama. The pen, the ledger the ink are his artist's brush, canvas, and paint with them he captures some phases of each dramatic movement of the scene.

This article focuses on statistical controls applied to financial statements. Most top executives, except controllers, are not specifically trained in accountancy. Yet the top executive spends much of his time on the financial aspects of his business and in the interpretation of accounting records. Sometimes he finds himself studying detailed and massive accounting reports, trying to find in them the clues to his problems. When the analysis of past data has been completed, top management can use the charts for setting goals or objectives in the future, and can follow month by month the progress made toward each goal. It might be argued that these effects of the end of the war would have been realized by top management without the aid of the chart. That is undoubtedly true, but the strength of action charts is found in a number of factors, in their graphic appeal to understanding through the eves, in the power they have to sell all levels of supervision on the necessity and wisdom of management policies, and in the completeness and clarity with which they enable the men at the top of a business to trace the effects of such external events as war, peace, price changes, booms, and depressions.

In making an approach to the problems connected with the correlation of costs to financial statements, it might be pertinent to give some thought to the evolution which has occurred, over the course of many years, in the concept of the principal function of accounting. However, the emergence of the industrial era, with the resultant broadening of capital risk attendant upon the formation and operation of large industrial enterprises, marked the beginning of a new concept of the use of accounts. As the corporate form of enterprise, often comprising a large number of stockholders became more prevalent, there was consequently created a class of investors were not active in management of the business in which they had invested their capital. Thus was evolved the practice of the periodical statement of earnings, usually covering, as a matter of convenience, a period of a year, and supported by a statement of financial condition, or balance sheet, as of the end of the period for which the report of progress was made.

Reviews the book "Code of Higher Accounting and Auditing," by Orlando López-Hidalgo.

Reviews the book "Practical Management Research," by A.R. Wiren and Carl Heyel.