What’s The Difference Between Accountancy and Accounting?

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To be honest, in today’s world, not much – the terms have become pretty much interchangeable. Traditionally, however, Accountancy is the parent term for the entire field and accounting was a specific duty of an accountant.

Accountancy was referred to as the actual process of communicating information about the financial state of a company to its shareholders, usually in the form of financial statements, which show the assets and resources under the company’s control in monetary terms.

Accounting was, under this definition, one of the three principles of accountancy (the others were bookkeeping and auditing), which was the application of reading and maintaining the financial records of said company.

While that’s interesting, and probably useful to know for archaic questions on pub quizzes, or the odd pedantic bloke in your workplace who you’ll be able to shut up with your mad knowledge, it’s almost certainly not going to affect your career and you can (in pretty much all situations) use the terms interchangeably without anyone calling you out.

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