**Accounting is a post mortem survey: Agree or Disagree?**

Introduction:
Accounting is a comprehensive process that involves recording, summarizing, analyzing, and interpreting financial information. It plays a crucial role in providing valuable insights into the performance, profitability, and financial health of an organization. However, to determine if accounting is indeed a post mortem survey, we need to delve deeper into its purpose, functions, and timing.

**Accounting as a Proactive Tool:**
1. Planning and Decision Making:
Accounting is not solely focused on analyzing historical data. It also plays a proactive role in planning and decision making. Through budgeting and forecasting, accountants help organizations set financial goals, allocate resources, and make informed decisions about future endeavors. This proactive aspect of accounting ensures that businesses can anticipate and mitigate potential risks, preventing them from being reactive or solely relying on past information.

**Accounting as a Reactive Tool:**
1. Historical Record Keeping:
One perspective supporting the claim that accounting is a post mortem survey is its emphasis on recording past transactions. By maintaining accurate records of financial transactions, accounting provides a historical perspective on the organization's financial activities. These records act as a reliable source of information for analyzing past performance and assessing financial outcomes.

2. Compliance and External Reporting:
Accounting also serves a reactive purpose in terms of compliance with legal and regulatory requirements. Organizations are required to prepare financial statements and reports that reflect their financial position, performance, and cash flows. Compliance with these reporting standards ensures transparency and accountability to stakeholders and regulators. In this context, accounting can be seen as a post mortem survey, as it involves summarizing and presenting historical data to external parties.

**Conclusion:**
While accounting does involve analyzing historical data and preparing financial statements, it is not limited to being a post mortem survey. It also plays a proactive role in planning, decision making, and providing valuable insights for future actions. By combining historical analysis with future-oriented budgeting and forecasting, accounting serves as a comprehensive tool for organizations to assess their financial performance and make informed decisions. Therefore, it is inaccurate to label accounting solely as a post mortem survey.

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