I found financial accounting to be one of the most interesting courses I've taken. It's basically thousands of pages of rules to simply try to match expenses an

I found financial accounting to be one of the most interesting courses I've taken. It's basically thousands of pages of rules to simply try to match expenses and revenues at the appropriate time so that you know if your business decisions are individually profitable without getting misled by different timings of cash coming in and going out. And it's basically incapable of handling IP-based businesses like software and pharmaceutical R&D. Those tend to be one-shot gambles on R&D, where you have absolutely no clue if your investment will pay off, and if it does the margins are nearly 100%. But they have to try anyway, leading to many clever-but-imperfect patches on the GAAP system.