Accounting English: Vocabulary, Study Roadmap, and Self-Study Resources

Reading financial statements in English isn't hard. Balance sheet, income statement — you run into these terms every day, you read them and you understand them. But when it comes time to meet with foreign auditors, or to listen to a partner explain a provision or an accrual, you lose the thread. It's not that the concepts are unfamiliar — Vietnamese accounting also has provisions, also has accrued expenses. The problem is that your ear isn't used to how people say those words.

Accounting vocabulary isn't as large as in technical fields, but there's a layer of words whose Vietnamese translations look very similar to each other while their accounting meanings are clearly distinct. Provision, accrual, reserve can all be translated as "dự phòng" with a quick lookup, but the three terms sit on three different lines of the financial statements.

This article starts from that layer of words, then moves to where the ear tends to miss things when listening, and only after that comes the vocabulary tables for specialised accounting English, grouped by topic: financial statements, assets and funding sources, revenue and expense, tax and audit.

• Easily confused word pairs in specialised accounting English
• Why your ear still misses it even when you know the word by sight
• Financial statement vocabulary
• Assets and funding sources vocabulary
• Revenue, expense and profit vocabulary
• Tax and audit vocabulary
• A roadmap for accounting professionals
• Frequently asked questions

Easily confused word pairs in specialised accounting English

A few pairs of near-synonyms cause more trouble than entirely new words, because a quick lookup gives you the same Vietnamese meaning for all of them. A common scenario: you write an email reporting the month's revenue to a foreign boss, and you use income when what you mean is revenue — the total sales amount before expenses are deducted. Your boss reads it and thinks the company is more profitable than it actually is.

The first table below gives a quick distinction between four commonly confused groups; the table after that has pronunciation and example sentences.

There's one more pair that gets mentioned less often: credit and debit. In Vietnamese, "nợ" usually carries a negative meaning, so many people default to assuming debit means an amount owed. In reality, debit is just the left-hand side of a journal entry — it can increase an asset or decrease a liability, depending on the account type. Getting this wrong means misreading the direction of increase or decrease for an entire line of figures.

Why your ear still misses it even when you know the word by sight

Many accounting terms have Latin roots, which look familiar because Vietnamese has equivalent Sino-Vietnamese words, but you can't guess the stress from the spelling. On top of that, accounting English loves abbreviations — EBITDA, VAT, COGS — and each one is read a different way.

Take accrued expense as an example. Said quickly in the sentence "we booked an accrued expense for December," the final /d/ sound of accrued runs straight into expense, and a new listener's ear easily catches it as "we booked a crude expense," dropping the single most important word entirely. EBITDA works the other way round: looking at the letters you want to spell it out one by one, but in a meeting people say the whole thing as a single word, something close to "uh-BIT-duh." Transcribing it wrong and then checking it against the written text is exactly the moment your brain links the right sound to the right word.

This is why learning vocabulary in context works better than flashcards, and dictation practice suits specialised vocabulary better than memorising lists, according to 5 steps to effective dictation practice. Most of the gaps come from connected sounds, something the article connected speech, the secret to understanding native speakers explains in more depth.

Busy closing the books at month-end, busy reporting at quarter-end, there's almost no time left for extra study. Fifteen minutes a day is still enough to transcribe a short passage if you pick content relevant to your work, according to the article for busy people learning English 15 minutes a day. If you're not sure where your vocabulary currently stands, the free vocabulary test gives you a starting point.

Financial statement vocabulary

This layer of vocabulary shows up right on the first page, from the names of the different statements to the phrases that go with talking about the accounting period.

Assets and funding sources vocabulary

This group splits into the two sides of the balance sheet: the assets a company holds, and the funding sources that show where those assets came from.

Revenue, expense and profit vocabulary

This is the vocabulary of business-results meetings, and it's where cost and expense often get mixed up.

Tax and audit vocabulary

This group is used when there's an independent audit, or when working with foreign partners.

A roadmap for accounting professionals

Accountants typically run into English in four places: international standards, statements and disclosures, calls with auditors, and emails with foreign audit firms. Those four places don't demand the same skill, so the three stages below follow the order in which the job forces you to get good at them.

1. Stage one, read standards and disclosures without needing to translate. Each week, take one section of disclosures from the English-language financial statements of a listed company, read it aloud once, then underline five recurring phrases like in accordance with, as at the reporting date, carrying amount. Reporting language repeats a great deal — learn it once, reuse it all year.
2. Stage two, be able to follow an audit call. Auditors' questions are usually short and revolve around things you could already answer in Vietnamese: on what basis was this item recognised, where does the discrepancy come from, is there a source document. Each week, take one roughly ten-minute accounting podcast episode, transcribe the first two minutes, then open the transcript to check where you missed things.
3. Stage three, be able to answer in your own words. Each week, take a real request you've received before and write the answer out in English: what you're sending, where the figures are, what's still missing and when it will be ready. Read it back once before you consider it done.

Self-study resources should be the ones people actually in the profession really use, prioritising places that already have transcripts.

• IFRS Foundation (ifrs.org): the body that manages the international standards; register a free account and you can view the original text, so you read the exact wording an auditor will cite.
• ACCA (accaglobal.com): the technical articles section is free to access, organised by standard and by exam paper, written in an explanatory voice rather than as bullet points.
• Accounting Best Practices (accountingtools.com): Steve Bragg's podcast, each episode seven to ten minutes, and every episode has a full transcript on the site.
• Journal of Accountancy Podcast (journalofaccountancy.com): the podcast of the American accounting association, many episodes come with a transcript to read alongside, and it stays closer to everyday practice than to theory.

All four sources above are free to read, but only the last two have transcripts for their podcasts, which is what you need if you're planning to do dictation practice.

Frequently asked questions

Is specialised accounting English harder than everyday conversational English?

The vocabulary is smaller than in many other fields, but the precision required is higher. Mixing up turnover and revenue in casual conversation is usually fine; getting it wrong in a report sent to an auditor is a different matter.

Do ACCA or CPA studies require their own specialised accounting English?

Yes. The exams and materials for both certifications use the original English terminology, not translated into Vietnamese. Having a solid grasp of the vocabulary in this article is a foundation, but the syllabus carries a far larger volume of terminology.

What's the easiest way to remember the difference between provision and accrual?

Provision is an amount whose figure isn't yet clear, accrual is an amount that has no invoice yet. The table of easily confused word pairs at the start of the article has an example sentence for each case.

Do you need to learn IPA to pronounce these words correctly?

You should at least learn the stress pattern. Get the stress wrong on amortisation or depreciation and a native speaker will still understand you, but you'll have a hard time catching the right word when they say it back to you.

How long does it take learning accounting English vocabulary before you can read financial statements?

It depends on whether you read English-language financial statements regularly or not. Reading comprehension comes sooner than listening comprehension, because your eyes have time to pause and your ears don't.

Besides the vocabulary list, what else do you need to learn to work with foreign partners or auditors?

You need to be able to catch figures spoken quickly — for example, someone reading out "twelve point four million" during a presentation — not just recognise the vocabulary when reading an email.

The vocabulary tables in this article are enough to get you through an entire financial statement and to stop you freezing up when someone says provision or turnover in a meeting. What's left is hours of listening practice, and the free listening level test tells you what level to start at.

If you work in a different field, the overview article specialised English has core vocabulary tables for each field.