22108 Chap.1 What Accounting Is and Who It Serves
What Accounting Is and Who It Serves
Week 1 of University of Technology Sydney 22108 Accounting and Accountability spends its whole time on the two words in the subject's title, and it is the only week of the session that carries no assessable quiz. It defines accountability in the Oxford English Dictionary sense the subject uses - a liability to account for and answer for one's conduct and performance of duties - and then the definition of accounting the subject actually teaches: Carnegie, Parker and Tsahuridu (2021), accounting as a technical, social and moral practice concerned with the sustainable utilisation of resources and proper accountability to stakeholders. That three-dimension framing is the thread the whole subject is hung on, so it returns in short-answer form in the weekly Canvas quizzes, in the theory criterion of the in-tutorial problem rubric, and in the final exam.
What this chapter covers
- 01Accountability defined (OED sense): liability to account for and answer for one's conduct and performance of duties
- 02The Carnegie, Parker and Tsahuridu (2021) definition of accounting as a technical, social and moral practice - and why the definition widened over time
- 03The accountability chain: financial statements and financial information hold management answerable, and management remuneration is tied to reported performance
- 04The branches of accounting: financial, management, auditing, taxation and forensic - who each serves and what regulates it
- 05Accounting arose independently in many cultures; counting notation itself is culturally situated, so recognition and disclosure practices differ across jurisdictions
- 06Indigenous perspectives on accounting as part of the history and scope of the discipline (custodianship, relationship to Country, intergenerational stewardship as a lens on 'sustainable utilisation of resources')
- 07How this subject runs: blended with no traditional lectures, a free open-access Pressbooks textbook, Excel from Week 2, and accounting taught WITHOUT debits and credits
Applying the accountability frame to a non-business setting
- +1Who answers to whom. The committee - and specifically the treasurer, who was entrusted with the resources - answers to the members who provided them. That is accountability in the sense the subject uses: a liability to account for and answer for one's conduct and performance of duties.
- +1The measure. The account is rendered in accounting information: what came in, what went out, and what remains. Without a common measure there is nothing for the members to judge, which is exactly why the monetary-measurement assumption exists.
- +1The consequence. Members can decline to approve the accounts, refuse to re-elect the committee, or ask for an investigation. Accountability without a possible consequence is only disclosure - naming the consequence is what earns this mark.
- +1Why it is incomplete. Carnegie, Parker and Tsahuridu (2021) define accounting as a technical, social AND moral practice concerned with the sustainable utilisation of resources and proper accountability to stakeholders. A receipts-and-payments page discharges the technical dimension only. It does not address whether the resources were used in the members' interests, whether some members were served and others ignored, or whether the spending was sustainable - the social and moral dimensions the definition deliberately adds.
Key terms
- Accountability
- The quality of being accountable; a liability to account for and answer for one's conduct and performance of duties - in modern use, often corporate or financial liability to the public or to shareholders. This is the Oxford English Dictionary sense the subject adopts.
- Accounting (as this subject defines it)
- "A technical, social and moral practice concerned with the sustainable utilisation of resources and proper accountability to stakeholders to enable the flourishing of organisations, people and nature" (Carnegie, Parker and Tsahuridu, 2021). The examinable point is that the definition widened from a purely technical one to include the social and the moral.
- Stakeholder
- Any party with an interest in the organisation's resources or conduct - shareholders and investors, lenders, suppliers, customers, employees and unions, government and regulators, analysts and the wider community. The subject asks the normative question of whether stakeholders beyond shareholders should be considered.
- Financial vs management accounting
- Financial accounting reports historically and at whole-of-entity level to external users under Australian Accounting Standards; management accounting reports forward-looking, segment-level, tailored information to internal managers and is not externally regulated. Topics 1-6 of this subject are the financial half, Topics 7-12 the management half.
- Accountability mechanism
- A device through which an account is actually rendered and acted on - financial statements and financial information, holding managers answerable for their decisions, and tying management remuneration to reported performance. Naming a mechanism, not just the idea, is what earns marks.
What Accounting Is and Who It Serves FAQ
Why does 22108 spend a whole week on definitions before any accounting?
Because the definition is the argument. If accounting were only a technical practice, the interesting questions would all be procedural. By adopting a definition in which accounting is technical, social and moral, the subject sets up everything that follows: why internal controls exist, why a fraud triangle has an attitudes leg, why analysis is about deciding what to investigate rather than issuing a verdict, and why the final topic is called 'integrating accounting and accountability'. Week 1 also carries no assessable quiz, which makes it the cheapest week of the session to get genuinely on top of.
Do I really not need debits and credits in this subject?
Correct - and it is the single most distinctive fact about 22108. This subject teaches accounting WITHOUT debits and credits. Transactions are analysed as flows into, out of and within the business and recorded as signed movements across the columns of the expanded accounting equation on an Excel worksheet. The subject frames debits and credits as technical terminology layered on top of those fundamentals, taught in later study. Practically, this means a generic textbook or an untuned AI answer will not match what your marker expects, so check that any outside source you use is answering in flows rather than in Dr/Cr.
Can AI help me with the Week 1 accountability material?
Yes, as a study aid. Sia is an AI tutor built to mirror how 22108 is taught and assessed at University of Technology Sydney: it can rehearse the four-slot accountability sentence with you on fresh scenarios, take apart the three dimensions of the definition, and check whether your short answer actually names a mechanism and a consequence rather than gesturing at them. It explains step by step and does not do graded assessment for you, and the UTS academic-integrity policy applies to everything you submit in this subject.
What is the free textbook and do I have to buy anything?
This subject supplies a free open-access textbook, Accounting and Accountability, published on Pressbooks, with an audiobook version linked from Canvas; chapters 1 to 6 map one-to-one onto Topics 1 to 6. There is nothing to buy. (The UTS Course Handbook records this subject at 6 credit points; the credit-point value is not stated on the Canvas pages themselves, so take it from the Handbook and your course plan.) The one thing you do need is Microsoft Excel installed on a computer by Week 2 - a phone is not sufficient for the tutorial - and UTS provides an Office 365 licence. Additional readings come through the Reading List tool in Canvas; confirm the current list on your Subject Outline.
Exam move
Week 1 is the only week with no assessable quiz, so spend the time you would have spent on it building the frame the rest of this subject sits on. Write the accountability definition and the Carnegie, Parker and Tsahuridu (2021) definition out in full once, by hand, then compress each to a phrase you can reproduce under time pressure - a liability to account and answer for one's conduct; a technical, social and moral practice concerned with sustainable resource use and proper accountability to stakeholders. Practise the four-slot sentence (who answers, to whom, measured by what, with what consequence) on three settings of your own. Learn the five branches of accounting as a table with a user and a regulator in each row, because that is a natural matching-question shape. Register for U:PASS and get Excel installed now rather than in Week 2 under quiz pressure, and read the Subject Outline properly this week - it is the definitive source for every assessment detail in this subject and it is the document you will be sent back to all session.
Working through What Accounting Is and Who It Serves in 22108? Sia is AskSia’s AI Accounting tutor — ask any 22108 What Accounting Is and Who It Serves question and get a clear, step-by-step explanation grounded in how 22108 is taught and assessed. Read this chapter free, then take your hardest questions to Sia.
