Accounting Map

How the Accounting Map works

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The Accounting Map book

The Accounting Map: Understand the Entire “Flow of Money” with Just One Diagram

This is an introductory accounting book that organizes accounting terms simply with one shared diagram. Two things tend to trip up people who want to learn accounting: how hard the terms are to understand, and how hard the relationships between those terms are to grasp. The “Accounting Map” solves that difficulty. Using a single diagram, it visualizes and explains the meaning of the terms and their relationships. And by following the Accounting Map, you can see how your work connects to your company and to society.

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How the Accounting Map Was Born

Just hearing the word “accounting,” many people feel “this seems difficult.” I was one of them. I thought it had nothing to do with me. At the risk of being misunderstood, I think most people today are doing work that either “raises revenue” or “cuts costs.” How about you? Of course, neither of those is wrong—they couldn't be. But don't you sometimes feel a sense of discomfort about work that consists entirely of chasing the numbers in front of you, raising revenue and cutting costs? Don't you sometimes want to truly feel what the work in front of you is ultimately for, and what it connects to? I did. In other words, it was something like a sense of connection to society, of contribution to society, of self-efficacy—the feeling that through my work I am connected to society and having an effect on it. How is my work actually useful to society? I wanted to know. And yet, something as vague as a “sense of contribution” is invisible. So we measure it through the flow of money. The flow of money is visible: how much money is used for what, and how it circulates, can be expressed in numbers. Not only through work, but simply by living—even just by buying products—everyone is involved in society's economic activity. The very act of living means being involved in the flow of money across society as a whole. But the “arrow” that shows how the work in front of you connects to society has become a black box. The connection between your work and society is, above all, hard to see. To begin with, it is difficult to see the flow of money across all of society at once. So, by looking at the flow of money of the “company”—one of society's main components—you can learn how you contribute to society. The tool for that is “accounting,” because accounting is a common language. Precisely because the rules for tracking and managing the flow of money are decided worldwide, everyone can work with peace of mind. Just as it is never too early to learn English, if you know accounting you can converse with people of any generation and any position. Accounting connects “me” and “society.” Because accounting describes the flow of money, knowing how money flows through the world leads to knowing society. I hope the Accounting Map spreads as a way for people who have never engaged with accounting to begin to know society.