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Assets: balance sheet accounts

Published on January 28, 2026   10 min

A selection of talks on Finance, Accounting & Economics

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0:00
Hi. Janis Weber here. I am continuing the series that introduces financial accounting concepts. So this has been a good experience for me, and I'm hoping to make accounting something that's interesting to you as well. So maybe you will dig in a little deeper and learn more about accounting in the future. Today, this session will cover just a little more detail about one of the concepts we've been talking about a lot, and that is the assets of the company.
0:32
My background in accounting spans two careers. First, I was a CPA in public practice, and then now I'm an educator for a public university.
0:45
The assets, basically, are everything the company owns that they could produce income with or that could help them to be a success in their company. So the term we've used to refer to assets is resources. Resources are these investments we have made that will provide a future economic benefit to the company, and they could be that they would produce cash flow such as more revenue, increased revenue, or lower cost, or they might increase productivity if we're producing some product or service. And then that ultimately would give us subsequent income because of our investment in these assets. Secondarily, in order for it to be considered an asset besides just being a resource, the company can use in order to be an asset, it must have an ownership element. So the company has to have invested something to have obtained this resource. That could mean they paid cash for it or they gave other assets in exchange for it, or maybe they promised to make payments in the future as in they borrowed money to buy it. But somehow or another, this company has to have extended themselves to own the goods that they're using as resources in the company. Then once the company has acquired these resources, then their mission is to make money with these assets, so to help produce the goods or services or otherwise produce additional income.

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Assets: balance sheet accounts

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