Enterprise

An enterprise (a.k.a. economic entity, entity, business, business entity, commercial venture, undertaking, firm, industrial organization, company) can be small (i.e. small business), medium (i.e. mid-market), or large (i.e. enterprise level corporations).

An enterprise is organized and has some purpose or "mission" or "mandate". An enterprise could be a business, a not-for-profit organization, a government agency. An enterprise mobilizes people, processes, and resources to achieve some specific goal or produce some sort of value for it's stakeholders at scale and involves risk, initiative, execution, planning, coordination. 

Microsoft is an enterprise; so is the state of Washington, so is the Italian restaurant where I had dinner last night.

An enterprise can be broken down into parts in different ways.  An enterprise can have functional units such as departments, business units such as divisions, legal and accounting units such as subsidiaries, or internal units used to manage financial outcomes of the enterprise such as cost or profit centers.

An enterprise might have a single location, multiple locations in one country, multiple locations in multiple different countries.

An enterprise has a legal form which might be an individual, partnership, corporation, association, or some other group or union of a set of individuals which is not a legal entity.

An enterprise can also be broken down by the geographic regions or area in which the enterprise operates.

An enterprise typically operates within some category referred to as "industry classification" or "industry segment" or "business segment" or "activity".  For example, banking, insurance, hospitality, airlines, and software company are industry segments. Or, an enterprise might be a conglomerate and perform many different activities.

An enterprise has institutional knowledge.

An enterprise has business processes.

An enterprise has a strategy.

An enterprise has a plan.

An enterprise typically performs record keeping, bookkeeping, and accounting. Many times information must be provided to regulators, tax authorities, other government agencies, etc.

An enterprise owns resources (i.e. assets) and has obligations to owners (i.e. equity) and obligations to third parties (i.e. liabilities).

As part of the purpose,  mission, or mandate of an enterprise an enterprise typically engages in economic activity with one to many other enterprises. Economic activity can result in an economic exchange which results in a situation which spawns a business event. Such a business event might spawn a financial transaction. Business events and the financial transactions they spawn result in changes in state of resources and obligations of an enterprise.

An enterprise uses general purpose financial statements to provide information to others about the resources, obligations, and changes in resources and obligations of the enterprise (see Accounting Equation).  General purpose financial reports provide information about the financial position of a reporting enterprise, which is information about the entity’s economic resources and the claims against the reporting entity. An enterprises general purpose financial statement might be compiled, reviewed, or audited by an independent third party.

Sometimes general purpose financial statements and other information needs to be provided to regulators of the enterprise.

An enterprise might use one or multiple currencies in the recording of business events and financial transactions.

An enterprise might have an enterprise knowledge graph.

This is another type of Enterprise.

Additional Information:

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