Dear Dr. Word,
I am a graduate student of MIS at Northern Illinois University. I took Dr. Yipeng Liu’s course of Advanced Topic of Information Systems using your textbook - Integrated Business Process With ERP Systems. Your textbook is great. I have a question to discuss with you.
On page 62 of your textbook, I don’t think the accounting process of purchasing supplies is correct. In the example, “GBI purchases office supplies for $500 with a check. Office supplies are expensed; that is, they are defined as money spent rather than treated as an asset upon purchase, even if some of the supplies remain unused. In this case, the relevant accounts are bank and supplies expense.”
Actually, supplies unused are assets of companies. Otherwise we don’t need an account called supplies at all. In the given example, I think we should credit $500 to bank account and debit $500 to supplies account. If at the end of the fiscal year, we used only $300 supplies, then we credit $300 to supplies account and debit $300 to supplies expense account. This is the typical process of supplies accounting.
“Office supplies are expensed; that is, they are defined as money spent rather than treated as an asset upon purchase, even if some of the supplies remain unused. “ This practice actually goes against the Matching Principle of General Acceptable Accounting Principles (GAAP). It’s not a good example especially in textbook, even though lots of companies are doing real business like this.
I am looking forward to hearing your thoughts of my comments on supplies accounting of your textbook.
Best regards,
Tingkai (Tank)
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