Accounting teachers can easily be so concerned to help their students grasp technicalities that they may miss the opportunity to drop suggestions now and then regarding the social service rendered by modern accounting. Business activities are such a prominent part of modern life that an elementary understanding of business, such as can be obtained through even a little study of accounting, can prepare the individual to be a more comprehending citizen. For example, business enterprises generate a very large amount of government revenue. Some understanding of enterprise accounting therefore provides some understanding of one of the bases on which modern government stands-government services paid for by revenue derived from business profits. Accounting not only gives us a glimpse of business as a generator of tax revenue but it helps us to realize that business, in one way or another, "is the paymaster of us all." Out of business activities comes wages of workers, wages of capital, wages of management. Business-by division of labor, by use of machine power, by developing mass distribution of products has created vast areas of employment for men and capital.

The study of accountancy may be said to possess three primary use values: (1) as a foundation for a professional career in public accounting, (2) as providing knowledge of an information service for business management and investors, (3) as one way of leaning disciplined thinking about dealing with data. The first two uses are well known and need no elaboration here. The third use value is the sort usually attributed to mathematics and statistics. But accounting also insists on accurate identification of detail and the organization of data in a meaningful way. Its study at the university level provides some of the same kind of beneficial discipline as these other subjects, and therefore it possesses general educational values in addition to the more strictly technical values for students of business management and professional accounting. Use values such as these have been clearly recognized as lying in the study of accounting. Because of this, there has been a widespread acceptance of the subject matter as useful outside of a purely occupational framework for a career in accounting as such.