Accounting deals with the transactions and events involving a specific economic entity. This economic entity is of concern, in different ways, to its management, its stockholders, its long and short-term creditors, its employees, and various regulatory and taxing bodies. All except the regulatory and taxing bodies are more concerned with the future of the entity than with its past. The past is important as it affects specific obligations, but is primarily important as it foreshadows the future. An economic entity is basically an economic relationship among persons. Accounting, in turn, "is the art of recording, classifying and summarizing in a significant manner and in terms of money, transactions and events which are, in part at least, of a financial character, and interpreting the results thereof. "Accounting must obviously be done from the viewpoint of the economic entity involved in the transactions. It must deal with the transactions, or with the events involving the economic entity.

The article highlights of the judgment forming process, some of the major non-accounting areas in which accountants have unparalleled opportunity for exercising broader and managerially useful judgments, and the outline of areas for increased emphasis by the accounting profession in training accountants for an enlarged judgmental role. Professional accountants have for many years furnished services to management with respect to opinions and advice on the reliability and fairness of historical financial data. Useful as this traditional service may be, it has less value to management as a planning and control device than many other mechanisms or techniques employed by business enterprise. The day is rapidly approaching when professional accountants can no longer afford the luxury of merely uncovering static facts and reporting them to management. The evolving nature of business enterprise over the past half century has been such that accountants who expect to occupy positions in or with respect to individual business enterprises must be prepared to exercise sound judgment in a variety of new, novel, and often perplexing situations confronting these enterprises.

Reviews the book "Accelerated Amortization," by David A. Thomas.

Reviews the book "Introduction to Law and Law of Contracts, Unit I," by William R. White.

Reviews two books. "Advanced Accounting Problems-Theory and Practice" and "Workbook to Accompany Advanced Accounting Problems," by Irving J. Chaykin and Max Zimering

"The Committee on Public Finance," a collaborative writing group consisting of sixty-six professors teaching at colleges and universities, have produced the latest in the long series of text books in public finance. Pooling their scholarship and teaching experience they have sought to meet the wants and needs of public finance instructors for a broad and comprehensive text "implicating the larger problems of freedom, justice, and the nature of individual and social well-being." The strong points of the book are its scope and organization which seek to fit the various phases of public finance into a single and unified process. The Committee deserves congratulations for its efforts to show the process of financing governments as one which involves economics, accounting, political science, administration, law, history, and sociology. The new text should help students to appreciate the complex and growing place of public finance in modern society, and instill a greater concern for the orderly administration of the public sector of the economy. It can make no greater contribution.

Reviews the book "Problems and Approaches to Solutions," vol.1, "Problems and Approaches," vol. 2, "Solutions and Answers," by Charles T. Horngren and J. Arthur Leer.

Reviews the book "Annual Reports of Companies," by R. Keith Yorston and E. Stanley Owens.