One area that accounting does not get right is accounting for the long term effects of short term actions.
Short term you can put crappy plastic in your car and save a couple of hundred dollars per vehicle. Long term you have spend thousands extra per vehicle in pricing discounts and advertising because your reputation.
Short term you can reduce employee shifts moving people to part time to save even more by reducing benefits. Long term good employees will leave and the ones that are left have such a poor attitude that people stop coming to your store.
Short term you can beat your suppliers down and make an extra ten percent on your appliances. Long term people don’t trust your brand and go direct.
In the software industry there is a term for this and it’s called “development debt”. It’s when you write quick and dirty code to solve a problem but you know you are going to have to come back and fix it. Ben Horowitz wrote and excellent piece about “management debt” http://bhorowitz.com/2012/01/19/management-debt/
The problem in my first three examples is there is no way to account for this even though the consequences are all monetary. There should almost be an entry in the balance sheet because the short term income is going to be repaid with interest. This is where “vision” and “leadership” come into play. Great companies know that there are no short term fixes to long term problems.