Business is the activity of making one's living or making money by producing or buying and selling products. Simply put, it is "any activity or enterprise entered into for profit."
The Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002, also known as the "Public Company Accounting Reform and Investor Protection Act" and "Corporate and Auditing Accountability, Responsibility, and Transparency Act" and more commonly called Sarbanes–Oxley, Sarbox or SOX, is a United States federal law that set new or expanded requirements for all U.S. public company boards, management and public accounting firms. A number of provisions of the Act also apply to privately held companies, such as the willful destruction of evidence to impede a federal investigation.
Financial statements are formal records of the financial activities and position of a business, person, or other entity.
Corporate governance is the collection of mechanisms, processes and relations used by various parties to control and to operate a corporation. Governance structures and principles identify the distribution of rights and responsibilities among different participants in the corporation and include the rules and procedures for making decisions in corporate affairs. Corporate governance is necessary because of the possibility of conflicts of interests between stakeholders, primarily between shareholders and upper management or among shareholders.
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a type of international private business self-regulation that aims to contribute to societal goals of a philanthropic, activist, or charitable nature by engaging in or supporting volunteering or ethically-oriented practices. While once it was possible to describe CSR as an internal organisational policy or a corporate ethic strategy, that time has passed as various international laws have been developed and various organisations have used their authority to push it beyond individual or even industry-wide initiatives. While it has been considered a form of corporate self-regulation for some time, over the last decade or so it has moved considerably from voluntary decisions at the level of individual organizations to mandatory schemes at regional, national, and international levels.
Corporate law is the body of law governing the rights, relations, and conduct of persons, companies, organizations and businesses. The term refers to the legal practice of law relating to corporations, or to the theory of corporations. Corporate law often describes the law relating to matters which derive directly from the life-cycle of a corporation. It thus encompasses the formation, funding, governance, and death of a corporation.
Corporate transparency describes the extent to which a corporation's actions are observable by outsiders. This is a consequence of regulation, local norms, and the set of information, privacy, and business policies concerning corporate decision-making and operations openness to employees, stakeholders, shareholders and the general public. From the perspective of outsiders, transparency can be defined simply as the perceived quality of intentionally shared information from the corporation.
In financial economics and accounting, the earnings response coefficient, or ERC, is the estimated relationship between equity returns and the unexpected portion of companies' earnings announcements.
Cross-listing of shares is when a firm lists its equity shares on one or more foreign stock exchange in addition to its domestic exchange. To be cross-listed, a company must thus comply with the requirements of all the stock exchanges in which it is listed, such as filing.
Socially responsible investing (SRI), social investment, sustainable socially conscious, "green" or ethical investing, is any investment strategy which seeks to consider both financial return and social/environmental good to bring about social change regarded as positive by proponents. Socially responsible investments often constitute a small percentage of total funds invested by corporations and are riddled with obstacles.
Management is a type of labor but with a special role-coordinating the activities of inputs and carrying out the contracts agreed among inputs, all of which can be characterized as "decision making". Managers usually face disciplinary forces by making themselves irreplaceable in a way that the company would lose without them. A manager has an incentive to invest the firm's resources in assets whose value is higher under him than under the best alternative manager, even when such investments are not value-maximizing.
Sustainability accounting was originated about 20 years ago and is considered a subcategory of financial accounting that focuses on the disclosure of non-financial information about a firm's performance to external stakeholders, such as capital holders, creditors, and other authorities. Sustainability accounting represents the activities that have a direct impact on society, environment, and economic performance of an organisation. Sustainability accounting in managerial accounting contrasts with financial accounting in that managerial accounting is used for internal decision making and the creation of new policies that will have an effect on the organisation's performance at economic, ecological, and social level. Sustainability accounting is often used to generate value creation within an organisation.
Dr. Merridee Bujaki is a tenured professor of accounting at the University of Ottawa located in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. In 2005, she became tenured as a full-time professor where she is now the manager of Accounting Studies as well as the section coordinator for Accounting, Finance and Information Systems. She is also the Secretary-Treasurer for the Association of Professors at the University of Ottawa and VP Communications for the Canadian Academic Accounting Association. Bujaki's primary activities are accounting and organizational behavior research.
Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance (ESG) refers to the three central factors in measuring the sustainability and societal impact of an investment in a company or business.
The Stewardship Code is a part of UK company law concerning principles that institutional investors are expected to follow. It was released in 2010 by the Financial Reporting Council, and is directed at asset managers who hold voting rights on shares in United Kingdom companies. Its principal aim is to make institutional investors, who manage "other people's money", be active and engage in corporate governance in the interests of their beneficiaries.
Active users is a measurement metric that is commonly used to measure the level of engagement a particular product or object has on the internet, by quantifying the number of active interactions from visitors within a relevant range of time . The metric has many uses in both commerce and academia, such as in a social networking service, online game, or mobile app. Although having extensive uses in digital behavioural learning, prediction and reporting, it also has impacts on the privacy and security, and ethical factors should be considered thoroughly. Like any metric, active users may have limitations and criticisms. Active Users is relatively new or neologistic in nature, that became important with the rise of the commercialised internet, with uses in communication and social-networking. It measures how many users visit or interact with the product or service over a given interval or period. This metric is commonly assessed per month as monthly active users (MAU), per week as weekly active users (WAU), per day as daily active users (DAU) or peak concurrent users (PCU).
In the United States, the compensation of company executives is distinguished by the forms it takes and its dramatic rise over the past three decades. Within the last 30 years, executive compensation or pay has risen dramatically beyond what can be explained by changes in firm size, performance, and industry classification. This has received a wide range of criticism leveled against it.
The Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) is a non-profit organization, founded in 2011 by Jean Rogers to develop sustainability accounting standards. Investors, lenders, insurance underwriters, and other providers of financial capital are increasingly attuned to the impact of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors on the financial performance of companies, driving the need for standardized reporting of ESG data. Just as the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) and the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) have established International Financial Reporting Standards and Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP), respectively, which are currently used in the financial statements, SASB's stated mission “is to establish industry-specific disclosure standards across ESG topics that facilitate communication between companies and investors about financially material, decision-useful information. Such information should be relevant, reliable and comparable across companies on a global basis.”
Cross border listings is the practice of listing a company's common shares on a different exchange than its primary stock exchange.
Social accounting is the process of communicating the social and environmental effects of organizations' economic actions to particular interest groups within society and to society at large. Social Accounting is different from public interest accounting as well as from critical accounting.
