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August 25, 2008

What is window dressing?

Window dressing refers to actions taken or not taken prior to issuing financial statements in order to improve the appearance of the financial statements.

Here is an example of window dressing. A company operates throughout the year with a negative balance in its general ledger Cash account. (Its balance at the bank is positive due to the time it takes for its checks to clear its bank account.)  Since the financial statements report the Cash amount appearing in its general ledger account, the financial statements would report a negative amount of Cash. However, the company does not want its December 31 balance sheet to report a negative cash balance, since it will be reviewed by many outsiders. To avoid reporting a negative cash balance the company does not make the payments for amounts that should be paid between December 26 and December 31. This postponement of payments allows its book amount of Cash to temporarily be a positive amount. Then on January 2, the company issues checks for all of the amounts that normally would have been paid at the end of December.




Comments

10 Responses to “What is window dressing?”

  1. del on August 27th, 2008 11:41 am

    Please help!! want to learn how to balance schedules.

    please advise on practice tests and info. regarding these items.

  2. srinivas on August 31st, 2008 3:00 am

    Goodafternoon, very good queastion

  3. srinivas on August 31st, 2008 3:01 am

    goodknowledge

  4. Banjo on September 5th, 2008 9:14 pm

    Is windrow dressing allowable practice?

  5. joseph on September 8th, 2008 10:48 pm

    how can you detect such a practice when analysing finanial statements

  6. shekar on December 12th, 2008 4:36 am

    Hi May i know deeply about Profit earnings ratio.

  7. praveen kumar on December 18th, 2008 12:38 am

    may i know in modern organization how to attract the people in financial statement

  8. Bookmarks about Accounting on March 5th, 2009 3:00 pm

    [...] - bookmarked by 1 members originally found by cypher13 on 2009-02-11 What is window dressing? http://blog.accountingcoach.com/window-dressing/ - bookmarked by 3 members originally found by [...]

  9. Abdul on March 19th, 2009 5:29 am

    Is there any effect of Window dressing on the financial statement, for creditor & also the profit of the company.

  10. obaid Ullah on June 9th, 2009 10:54 am

    window dressing is actually those legitimate measures taken by the management to make look business as strong as possible on the date of balance sheet.

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