Continuously Contemporary Accounting- Additivity and Action.

Abstract It is beyond dispute that financial statements have reference, in some sense, to the financial outcomes of past actions: to the net change in the residual equity and to the change in the composition of assets and equities. They relate only to financial consequences and characteristics. They say nothing about purely technical or purely mercantile outcomes of possibilities or positions. They do not indicate the age, the technical capacity, the spatial distribution or any similar characteristic of assets; they say nothing about the numbers and types of customers, suppliers, or workers of firms. For information on all such matters as these, business managers turn to other sources. The capacity of accounting to represent the aggregative consequences of actions taken, in terms of the current monetary unit and the value of aggregative statements of results and positions from time to time as indicators of possibilities and constraints (for the present command of resources constitutes the constraints of future actions), are the reasons for the widespread use of financial statements and the sources of the usefulness of accounting.