Business across cultures

ASSETS LIABILITIES AND THE BALANCE SHEET
You were probably introduced to the idea of deposits and withdrawals the moment you opened your first bank account. To save money, you want to make more deposits and fewer withdrawals—more money in, less money out. The same concept applies to running a business.
Whether you like it or not, being a business owner involves accounting. To grasp the state of your finances, it helps to understand what are referred to as assets (money in) and liabilities (money out)—the two primary items on financial statements and balance sheets.
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Table of contents
What are assets and liabilities?
Types of assets
Types of liabilities
Assets vs. liabilities
Assets, liabilities, and equity on a balance sheet
Examples of assets and liabilities on a balance sheet
Assets and liabilities FAQ
What are assets and liabilities?
Your balance sheet consists of two main categories: assets and liabilities. Assets are the items your company owns that bring in income or provide a future benefit. Liabilities are debts you owe to other parties, including other businesses or the government.
Types of assets
Long-term assets are the items you plan to hold onto for more than a year, while short-term assets can be easily converted into cash within a year. Assets are classified in terms of convertibility, usage, and physical existence:
Convertibility
Convertibility describes how easily an asset can be liquidated—i.e., converted into cash. Assets are either current or non-current (i.e., fixed) assets. Current assets can be converted into cash within one fiscal year, whereas non-current or fixed assets can’t. Examples of current assets include cash and cash equivalents. No-current or fixed assets can be real estate, vehicles, and intellectual property.
Usage
You can classify assets based on how they’re used—either as operating assets or non-operating assets. Operating assets are used in the day-to-day operation of your business, like computer equipment, heavy equipment, or an office building. Non-operating assets, like accounts receivable or investments, keep your business in the black, but you don’t use them daily.
Physical existence
Assets can be classified as tangible or intangible based on their physical existence. Tangible assets are those you can touch, like a building or a car. Intangible assets can’t be touched but still add value to your business, like intellectual property and goodwill.
Types of liabilities
Like assets, liabilities can be current or noncurrent. While liabilities seem negative at first, they can be very important for growth. For example, a Small Business Association (SBA) loan is a liability, but can provide much-needed funds for a small business owner.
Liabilities fall into two categories:
Current liabilities
Current liabilities are short-term debts that you plan to pay off within a year, such as credit card balances, payroll taxes, accounts payable, or expenses you haven’t been invoiced for yet. 
Non-current liabilities
Non-current liabilities are long-term debts that your business must pay off over a longer period. Examples include long-term loans, like a mortgage or a business loan, deferred tax payments, or a long-term lease.

SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT

Materials/components), operations management (ensuring the production of high-quality products at high speed with good flexibility and low production cost), logistics and marketing channels, through which raw materials can be developed into finished products and delivered to their end customers.[2][3] A more narrow definition of supply chain management is the "design, planning, execution, control, and monitoring of supply chain activities with the objective of creating net value, building a competitive infrastructure, leveraging worldwide logistics, synchronising supply with demand and measuring performance globally".[4][5] This can include the movement and storage of raw materials, work-in-process inventory, finished goods, and end to end order fulfilment from the point of origin to the point of consumption. Interconnected, interrelated or interlinked networks, channels and node businesses combine in the provision of products and services required by end customers in a supply chain.[6]
Supply chain management strives for an integrated, multidisciplinary, multimethod approach.[7] Marketing channels play an important role in supply chain management.[8] Current[when?] research in supply chain management is concerned with topics related to sustainability, volatility,[9] and risk management,[10] among others. An important concept discussed in SCM is supply chain resilience. Some suggest that the "people dimension" of SCM, ethical issues, internal integration, transparency/visibility, and human capital/talent management are topics that have, so far, been underrepresented on the research agenda.[11] SCM is the broad range of activities required to plan, control and execute a product's flow from materials to production to distribution in the most economical way possible. SCM encompasses the integrated planning and execution of processes required to optimize the flow of materials, information and capital in functions that broadly include demand planning, sourcing, production, inventory management and logistics—or storage and transportation.[12]
Although it has the same goals as supply chain engineering, supply chain management is focused on a more traditional management and business based approach, whereas supply chain engineering is focused on a mathematical model based one.[13]
Mission[edit]
Supply chain management, techniques with the aim of coordinating all parts of SC, from supplying raw materials to delivering and/or resumption of products, tries to minimize total costs with respect to existing conflicts among the chain partners. An example of these conflicts is the interrelation between the sale department desiring to have higher inventory levels to fulfill demands and the warehouse for which lower inventories are desired to reduce holding costs.[14]
Origin of the term and definitions[edit]
In 1982, Keith Oliver, a consultant at Booz Allen Hamilton, introduced the term "supply chain management" to the public domain in an interview for the Financial Times.[15] In 1983 WirtschaftsWoche in Germany published for the first time the results of an implemented and so called "Supply Chain Management project", led by Wolfgang Partsch.[16]
In the mid-1990s, the term "supply chain management" gained popularity when a flurry of articles and books came out on the subject. Supply chains were originally defined as encompassing all activities associated with the flow and transformation of goods from raw materials through to the end user or final consumer, as well as the associated information flows. Mentzer et al. consider it worthy of note that the final consumer was included within these early definitions.[17]: 2 Supply chain management was then further defined as the integration of supply chain activities through improved supply chain relationships to achieve a competitive advantage.[15]
In the late 1990s, "supply chain management" (SCM) rose to prominence, and operations managers began to use it in their titles with increasing regularity.[18][19][20] A supply chain, as opposed to supply chain management, is a set of firms who move materials "forward",[21] or a set of organizations, directly linked by one or more upstream and downstream flows of products, services, finances, or information from a source to a customer. Supply chain management is the management of such a chain.[17]
Other commonly accepted definitions of supply chain management include:
The management of upstream and downstream value-added flows of materials, final goods, and related information among suppliers, company, resellers, and final consumers.[22]
The systematic, strategic coordination of traditional business functions and tactics across all business functions within a particular company and across businesses within the supply chain, for the purposes of improving the long-term performance of the individual companies and the supply chain as a whole.[17]