Abstract The article presents information about accounting principles and the current classification. The current classification is primarily a classification for credit granting, which was popularized to meet needs of credit men many years ago, at a time when single entry book keeping was probably more prevalent than double entry, when there was no well-organized internal accounting worth mentioning, and when the statement of assets and liabilities furnished to creditors consisted substantially of estimates unsupported by anything approaching modern accounting records. The classification of current assets is bad classification from almost any viewpoint. The total of current assets is not homogeneous, for it is built up of unlike elements and unlike values. Accountants have not been unaware of complaints against the current classification nor have they been unaware of the need for reconciling this specialized credit concept with general accounting theory. Remedial measures which have been or are being proposed, however, do little to improve the situation from the accounting viewpoint, while at the same time they do much to diminish the credit utility of the current classification.
Stepwen Giman (1944) studied this question.