In both my experience previously as a supervisory accounting professional and now as an accounting professor, I have observed that accounting students and young professionals alike often prepare financial reports that are lacking in a variety of ways. In fact, in my reviews of thousands of draft reports over the years, I have observed issues that seem to congregate into five major categories, which I term the 5 Principles of Financial Reporting. While some aspects of these principles will likely be readily familiar to seasoned accounting professionals, this article should prove useful to younger professionals and even current accounting students, a tutorial of sorts, as they develop their financial reporting skills. In fact, this article is intended to serve as a training tool for new professionals. The five principles (ACCURACY, CONSISTENCY, APPEARANCE, EFFICIENCY, and USABILITY, with occasional overlap between them) are discussed.
