The accounting and taxation of the company is carried out within the framework of the accounting policy adopted by it. Its competent development ensures effective financial document flow of the company, facilitates accounting, helps to reduce the tax burden by legal methods.
Accounting policy is a document regulating the procedure for maintaining accounting and tax accounting in an organization, a set of rules for reflecting property, income, expenses, other operations, drawing up and submitting reports on the accounts. Its formation is regulated by PBU 1/2008 "Accounting policy of the organization".
Enterprises have the right to develop an accounting policy on their own, taking into account the specifics of the types of activities carried out, the sector of the economy, applicable tax regimes and other factors. Nevertheless, they must adhere to uniform methods of accounting: primary observation, value measurement, current grouping, final generalization of the facts of economic activity.
The accounting policy regulates several groups of issues:
- organizational: the distribution of responsibilities of accountants, the appointment of those responsible for keeping records in individual areas, the definition of analytical registers that will be used in accounting;
- technical: rules of document flow, information processing, etc.;
- methodological: rules and methods of accounting, calculating taxes, writing off expenses, etc.
As a rule, when forming an accounting policy, a working chart of accounts, forms of primary documents by type of operations, reporting forms between company divisions, an inventory procedure, and methods for assessing assets and liabilities of the balance sheet are simultaneously approved.
The accounting policy of the enterprise is drawn up by the chief accountant and approved by the order of the head. It can be drawn up as a single document, the information in which is set out in special sections, chapters, articles, as well as separate orders for the rules and methods of accounting, the calculation of each tax, etc.
With the help of accounting policies, you can bring accounting and tax accounting closer together. To do this, when developing it, you need to establish the same methods for writing off costs, recognizing costs, calculating depreciation, terms of using fixed assets, etc.
In addition, the accounting policy allows an enterprise to independently determine accounting methods in cases not regulated by law, and to approve samples of documents for which there are no unified forms.
