Accounting equation: does income really decrease equity?
"If your income stream goes up, it would usually increase both your ""income"" term and your ""assets"" term since that money sits in your bank account as an asset. (Even more likely a combination of assets and expenses go up if you have cost associated with the increase in income.)  In this case, they balance in the equation and your equity doesn't change. The question as you posed it is true mathematically, but the ""paradox"" happens because you're not taking into account where the money form the increased income falls in other terms of the equation." "Equity is the term to make things balance. In a simple transaction, you get $100 paid to you. Income goes up by $100 and the asset of whatever bank account or petty cash drawer you put it into also goes up by $100. Equity is unchanged. If for some reason you had to take some income into your books, but no asset increased, no debt decreased, and you had no way to take an offsetting expense into your books, then this would lower your equity. How else to explain having ""earned"" $100 but having nothing to show for it?" The accounting equation, in short, is: This can be further broken down into: Which can be further broken down into: The GnuCash equation is right, though I would substitute the word equity in that equation with a more-specific paid-in capital. Equity is (simply put) made up of 2 parts: shareholders' equity and retained earnings. Shareholders' equity is the amount invested by shareholders. Retained earnings is the amount earned by the business on behalf of the shareholders. Retained earnings is directly affected by your net income (which is income minus expenses). An increase in income will result in an increase in retained earnings. This must be balanced somewhere. Usually an increase in an asset. It may also be balanced by a decrease in equity. Likewise, increase in expenses will result in a decrease in retained earnings, which must also be balanced.
I think the most concise way to understand EV is the value of the *operating assets* of the firm. It's most generally used when using income statement or cash flow ratios that are unlevered - before applying interest expense (which if the firm is optimally financed, in theory should only impact the equity). Examples include revenue, EBIT, EBITDA, unlevered FCF, etc.  In your hypothetical scenario, you would expect the equity value of the firm to increase linearly as cash builds up. In other words, in some implausible, ceteris paribus formulation of the firm, the enterprise value should remain constant. It took me a while to understand the concept, so I'll break it down as best as I can.  There are three parts to the accounting equation: Assets = Liabilities + Owner's Equity We'll look at this in two ways   1. As a business owner you invest (say) 10,000 USD into your bank. The entry would be: Debit: Assets: Cash for 10,000    Credit: Owner's Equity: Contributions for 10,000 In this case, you have assets of 10,000 from your deposit, but it is due to owner contributions and not business transactions. Another example (say a sale):  Debit: Assets: Cash for 10,000    Credit: Owner's Equity: Sales for 10,000 Debit: Assets: Cash for 10,000    Credit: Liabilities: Deposits for 10,000 Deposits are a banking term to reflect a bank's obligation to return the amount on demand (though the bank has free reign with it, see fractional banking)  You will NEVER debit or credit your bank as it is assumed you will be storing your money there, note bank reconciliation. Hope this helps, comment with any more questions. Fuck managerial accounting to death. Anywho, I'm not sure what they mean by the variance being higher or lower in the budget. Variance in principle is the discrepancy from a budget and actual.   I'll try to answer this from what I can see.    The budget variance in this problem is unfavorable for Busy Community Support, mostly caused by a significant underestimating of your salaries expense in the budget. It doesn't change anything whatsoever about the underlying company.  I had a discussion like this during a case study in my Financial Statement Analysis class. It was a discussion about revenue recognition from the sales of iPhones, and whether it would be better for Apple if the regulation was changed to allow immediate recognition rather than deferring the income.  My argument is that it didn't matter one bit, because nothing is changing about how the company is actually run. Cash flow in and out of the company doesn't change. Maybe the accountants will have to work slightly shorter hours or something, but that's negligible.   The Accounting majors largely disagreed with me, while the Finance majors largely agreed. "In the US, and in most other countries, dividends are considered income when paid, and capital gains/losses are considered income/loss when realized. This is called, in accounting, ""recognition"". We recognize income when cash reaches our pocket, for tax purposes. So for dividends - it is when they're paid, and for gains - when you actually sell. Assuming the price of that fund never changes, you have this math do to when you sell: Of course, the capital loss/gain may change by the time you actually sell and realize it, but assuming the only price change is due to the dividends payout - it's a wash." Yes that is the case for the public company approach, but I was referring to the transaction approach:   Firm A and Firm B both have $100 in EBITDA. Firm A has $50 in cash, Firm B has $100 in cash.  Firm A sells for $500, Firm B sells for $600.  If we didn't subtract cash before calculating the multiple: Firm A: 5x Firm B: 6x  If we DO subtract cash before calculating the multiple: Firm A: 4.5x Firm B: 5x  So yea, subtracting cash does skew the multiple. The sentence you quoted does not apply in the case where you sell the stock at a loss. In that case, you recognize zero ordinary income, and a capital loss (opposite of a gain) for the loss. Reference: http://efs.fidelity.com/support/sps/article/article2.html Shareholders are the equity holders. They mean the same thing.  A simplified formula for the total value of a company is the value of its equity, plus the value of its debt, less its cash (for reasons I won't get into). There are usually other things to add or subtract, but that's the basic formula. "Equity does not represent production divisions in a company (i.e. chocolate, strawberry, and vanilla does not make sense).  In Sole proprietorship, equity represents 1 owner.  In Partnership, equity has at least two sub-accounts, namely Partner 1 and Partner 2.  In Corporations, equity may have Common Stockholders and Preferred Stockholders, or even different class of shares for insiders and angel investors.  As you can see, equity represents who owns the company. It is not what the company does or manufactures.  First and foremost, define the boundary of the firm. Are your books titled ""The books of the family of Doe"", ""The books of Mr & Mrs Doe"", or ""The books of Mr & Mrs Doe & Sons"".  Ask yourself, who ""owns"" this family. If you believe that a marriage is perpetual until further notice then it does not make any sense to constantly calculate which parent owns the family more. In partnership, firm profits are attributed to partner's accounts using previously agreed ratio. For example, (60%/40% because Partner 1 is more hard working and valuable to the firm.  Does your child own this family? Does he/she have any rights to use the assets, to earn income from the assets, to transfer the assets to others, or to enforce private property rights? If they don't have a part of these rights, they are certainly NOT part of Equity.  So what happens to the expenses of children if you follow the ""partnership"" model? There are two ways. The first way is to attribute the Loss to the parents/family since you do not expect the children to repay. It is an unrecoverable loss written off. The second way is to create a Debtor(Asset) account to aggregate all child expense, then create a separate book called ""The books Children 1"", and classify the expense in that separate book.  I advise using ""The family of Doe"" as the firm's boundary, and having 1 Equity account to simplify everything. It is ultimately up to you to decide the boundaries." "In general, when dealing with quantities like net income that are not restricted to being positive, ""percentage change"" is a problematic measure. Even with small positive values it can be difficult to interpret. For example, compare these two companies: Company A:  Company B:  At a glance, I think most people would come away with the impression that both companies did badly in Y2, but A made a much stronger recovery. The difference between 99.7 and 99.9 looks unimportant compared to the difference between 100,000 and 40,000. But if we translate those to dollars: Company A: Y1 $100m, Y2 $0.1m, Y3 $100.1m Company B: Y1 $100m, Y2 $0.3m, Y3 $120.3m Company B has grown by a net of 20% over two years; Company A by only 1%. If you're lucky enough to know that income will always be positive after Y1 and won't drop too close to zero, then this doesn't matter very much and you can just look at year-on-year growth, leaving Y1 as undefined. If you don't have that guarantee, then you may do better to look for a different and more stable metric,  the other answers are correct: Y1 growth should be left blank. If you don't have that guarantee, then it might be time to look for a more robust measure, e.g. change in net income as a percentage of turnover or of company value." No.  Revenue is the company's gross income.  The stock price has no contribution to the company's income.  The stock price may be affected when the company's income deviates from what it was expected to be. If you were a business, all your assets would have a dollar value, so when you sold them you'd decrease the amount of assets by that amount and increase in cash, and if there was a profit on the sale it would go in as income, if there was loss it would count as a cost (or a loss)... so if there was a profit it would increase Equity, a loss then it would decrease Equity.  Since it's not really worthwhile doing a estimated cost for everything that you have, I'd just report it as income like you are doing and let the amount of equity increase proportionately. So, implicitly you always had roughly that amount of equity, but some of it was in the form of assets, and now you're liquidating those assets so the amount shows up in GnuCash. When you buy new things you might sell later, you could consider adding them as assets to keep track of this explicitly (but even then you have problems-- the price of things changes with time and you might not want to keep up with those price changes, it's a lot of extra work for a family budget) -- for stuff you already have it's better to treat things as you are doing and just treat the money as income-- it's easier and doesn't really change anything-- you always had that in equity, some of it was just off the books and now you are bringing it into the books. "This formula is not calculating ""Earnings"".  Instead, it is calculating ""Free Cash Flow from Operations"". As the original poster notes, the ""Earnings"" calculation subtracted out depreciation and amortization.  The ""Free Cash Flow from Operations"" adds these values back, but for two different reasons:" "Yes - this is exactly what it means.  No losses (negative earnings).   With today's accounting methods, you might want to determine whether you view earnings including or excluding extraordinary items.   For example, a company might take a once-off charge to its earnings when revising the value of a major asset.  This would show in the ""including"" but not in the ""excluding"" figure.   The book actually has a nice discussion in Chapter 12 ""Things to Consider About Per-Share Earnings"" which considers several additional variables to consider here too. Note that this earnings metric is different from ""Stock Selection for the Defensive Investor"" which requires 10 years. PS - My edition (4th edition hardback) doesn't have 386 pages so your reference isn't correct for that edition.  I found it on page 209 in Chapter 15 ""Stock Selection for the Enterprising Investor""." "There are probably many correct answers to this question, but for most people, the main reason is qualified dividends. To be a qualified dividend (and therefore eligible for lower tax rates), the dividend-paying stock or fund must be held for ""more than 60 days during the 121-day period that begins 60 days before the ex-dividend date"". Since many stocks and funds pay out dividends at the end of the year, that means it takes until mid- to late February to determine if you held them, and therefore made the dividend qualified. Brokerages don't want to send out 1099s in January and then possibly have to send out revised versions if you decide to sell something that paid a dividend in December that otherwise would have been qualified."