Non-profit Organization Accounting Research

As a form of society organization, not-for-profit organizations have played an important role in the development of social economy throughout the world. A tremendous system of state-owned public organizations has been established to serve the country. And there are 1.3 million public organizations, 29 million people working in these organizations, which occupy 300 billion state-owned assets. 17% of Chinese researchers and 95% of teachers and doctors are affiliated to public organizations, and 30% of the finance expenditure of Chinese government has been paid to them. There are a great number of non-official not-for-profit organizations too, among which there are 142 thousand social organizations, 1200 mutual funds, and 124 thousand non-firm organizations. But research on accounting for not-for-profit organizations in our country has been dropped behind western countries for a long time. Furthermore, there is no formal accounting law in the system of accounting rules and laws. As the national economy develops, to reform the poor governance system of state-owned public organizations and to improve the managerial performance of social organizations is proposed to the agenda. Accordingly, the construction of accounting rules and laws of not-for-profit organizations should be proposed to the agenda too. So I chose to research the basic accounting problems of not-for-profit organizations to contribute to the agenda. And this is the main motive of my topic choice and the importance of this paper.Firstly, I analyzed the fundamental problems of not-for-profit organizations. Then I focused on some important accounting concepts of not-for-profit organizations, among which are accounting objectives, accounting entity, criterion of accounting recognition, accounting elements and recognition and measurement, financial statement, and performance appraisal. Lastly, I conceived some issues of construction of accounting rules and laws of not-for-profit organizations referring to the experience of other countries.The paper is organized as follows:Part one is the outline of not-for-profit organizations, which gives out the definition of not-for-profit organizations, and summarizes their characteristics and operation.Part two is the outline of accounting of not-for-profit organizations, which discusses two main differences between accounting of not-for-profit organizations and that of firms, which are the accounting objectives and the accounting entity.Part two also addresses some other concepts of accounting.Part three is accounting recognition, measurement, and report of not-for-profit organizations, which discusses the recognition and measurement of accounting elements, and conceives the content of financial report. Part three also discusses the performance appraisal of not-for-profit organizations.Part four investigates the construction of accounting rules and laws of not-for-profit organizations, which conceive the system of accounting rules and laws of not-for-profit organization of China on the base of those of other countries.The innovations of this paper are as follows:1) The paper clarifies the definition and characteristics of not-for-profit organizations.2) The paper makes a modest investigation of performance appraisal of not-for-profit organizations.3) The paper gives a conception of the accounting system of regulations of not-for profit organization.