2.2 Accounting principles

The accounting guidelines IAS and IFRS describe requirements to financial statements (reports) and the underlying accounting process ³³See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Financial_Reporting_Standards. Said requirements include qualitative characteristics:

1. 1.

   Relevance

2. 2.

   Faithful representation

3. 3.

   Comparability

4. 4.

   Verifiability

5. 5.

   Timeliness

6. 6.

   Understandability

While some - if not most - of these characteristics relate to the process of accounting, the “Verifiability” item clearly has an impact on the underlaying accounting systems: In order to be verifiable, there must be a clear audit trail to show the origin of the figures. To make sure users leave behind the required audit trail, some actions can’t be performed in LedgerSMB, even though it would seem to be a logical requirement to be able to do so - from the perspective of a non-accountant.