Accounting Basics
The financial statement that shows a company’s assets, liabilities, and equity.
What is the Balance Sheet?
The rate used to discount future cash flows to present value.
What is the Discount Rate?
This bank tool shares its name with a piece of gymnastics equipment.
What is a Vault?
The term for a budget that adjusts based on activity levels, not fixed numbers.
What is a Flexible Budget?
The fraud triangle consists of Opportunity, Rationalization, and this third component.
What is Pressure?
The accounting method that sounds like it belongs in a baseball game.
What is Double‑Entry Accounting?
A company’s mix of debt and equity financing.
What is Capital Structure?
Bank accounts with no contractual maturity, like checking and savings.
What are Non-Maturity Deposits?
The spreadsheet software released by Microsoft in 1985.
What is Excel?
This federal act passed in 2002 overhauled U.S. corporate accountability.
What is Sarbanes‑Oxley (SOX)?
The “Big Four” accounting firm whose name starts with a fruit.
What is Apple—just kidding! What is KPMG (formerly Peat Marwick)?
The name of Warren Buffett’s company headquartered in Omaha.
What is Berkshire Hathaway?
The famous 1930s bank robber whose crimes led to major federal reforms.
Who is John Dillinger?
This animal is famously used as a metaphor for long‑range uncertainty in forecasting.
What is the Black Swan?
An unusual entry or transaction that signals potential fraud.
What is a Red Flag?
This person is known as the “Father of Accounting."
Who is Luca Pacioli?
This three‑letter financial metric is often pronounced like a cartoon sound effect.
What is EBITDA?
This U.S. organization prints paper currency.
What is the Bureau of Engraving and Printing?
The “forecasting cone” is a tool often used in this non‑finance field.
What is Meteorology?
This famous fictional detective is often referenced in internal audit training.
Who is Sherlock Holmes?
This accounting concept explains why you can’t “forget” to record an expense just because you don’t like how it makes your month‑end variance look.
What is the Principle of Conservatism?
This valuation method is beloved by analysts because it lets them build a 40‑tab model, run 19 sensitivities, and still confidently say, “Well… the answer is somewhere in this range.”
What is Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) analysis?
The U.S. payment system that settles transactions in real time, 24/7, launched in 2023.
What is FedNow?
The budgeting strategy requiring teams to justify every expense from scratch each period.
What is Zero‑Based Budgeting?
This internal control framework, created by a commission with a very memorable acronym, is the backbone of risk assessments, audits, and half the documentation nobody wants to update.
What is the COSO Framework?