Knowledge that Transforms

Reviews the book "Fundamentals of Auditing," by R.K. Mautz.

Reviews the book "Taxation of Oil and Gas Income," by Clark W. Breeding and A. Gordon Burton.

The article focuses on the General Aptitude Test Battery (GATB) and the American Institute of Accountants (AIA) tests in predicting success in courses of accounting. Attracting persons who are capable of achieving success in the field of accounting is of concern to the members of the accounting profession, schools of business and vocational counselors. Very often students and vocational counselors have little understanding of the work which an accountant does, often confusing the work with that of book keeping or routine office work. At North Texas State College an attempt is being made to discover students capable of achieving success in the field of accounting. These students may fall into one of three categories, based upon scores made on certain selected tests namely, those who are capable and are at present majoring in the subject, those who are not capable and are planning to major in the field and those who are capable of majoring in the profession but are not aware of their aptitudes. Two tests developed in recent years, are called the GATB and the other developed by the AIA, offer to counselors the possibility of selecting students who will be successful in the field of accounting.

This article focuses on the funds statement as an internal report to management. making financial decisions. Sixty-four per cent of the companies using the funds statement as an internal report, or 123 companies, stated that they have used funds statements of past periods as aids in making current financial decisions. Sixty-eight per cent of the companies using the funds statement as an internal report, or 131 companies, have used projected funds statements as aids to decision-making. Of these companies, 94 stated that they have used both historical and projected funds statements. The majority of the companies using the funds statement as an internal statement and tool for decision-making regard it as strictly a short-term tool. Companies using the funds statement as an internal tool of management attempted to reconcile it with the various budgets or other anticipatory statements in many cases. Seventy-five per cent of the companies that reported that they used the funds statement for making financial decisions tied the funds statements in with one or more of their budgets.

Reviews the book "Industrial Accountant's Handbook," edited by Wyman P. Fiske and John A. Beckett.

Machine methods, the key to office automation, have developed impressively ever since the invention of the adding machine in the 1880's. Soon afterwards appeared the desk calculators. These milestones of machine method have progressively increased the areas of "automated" office operations. They have thereby progressively narrowed the need for the pencil and paper, the elemental tools of the accountant. As savers of human energy and time, all devices for mechanizing office tasks possess the same attributes, and the differences between them are relative only, important as the differences are. All of the known devices will continue to be useful, for the situations in the modern office in which machine methods are needed are as varied as they are vast. No doubt the future will see a more frequent reassessment of the functional usefulness of a particular machine in use to see if its versatility, speed and capability enable it to perform a task as economically as some other machine available in the market.

Reviews the book "Cutting Your Unemployment Taxes," by Richard J. Potter.

Reviews the book "A New Approach to Office Mechanization," by H.F. Van Gorder.

Reviews the book "The Modern Prudent Investor: How to Invest Trust Funds," by Charles P. Curtis

The article focuses on direct costing and the uses of cost data. Cost accounting is utilitarian. Stated another way, cost accounting is not an end in itself, but a means to an end, which is why the uses to be made of cost data are so important. Just how good the cost accounting is, is determined, not by reference to a stated body of principles or to established concepts, but in terms of how well the accounting does in fact meet the needs which it is intended to serve. Cost data are used for a variety of purposes. No one method will supply data which will serve all purposes equally well. This means that the cost accountant has the alternative either of selecting the method best suited to the use which is considered primary and using the costs developed by this method for all other purposes, or of developing costs specifically for each intended use. More and more companies are adopting the second alternative and instructing cost departments not to honor requests for cost data until the use to be made of the data is stated and the costs developed with the stated use in mind.