One of the more archaic meanings of "concern" is a business. It was a common term up until the early 20th century. Remember that prior to that time, corporations were much more difficult to form, and a "company" was usually referring to specific entities vs. the more typical partnerships and other entities.
A "going concern" is a business that is operating and making a profit. A "going concern warning" is a term of art that implies that a company's situation (usually fiscal) is such that it may need to stop operating. In other, smaller, contexts disasters like a loss of key staff trigger that kind of warning.
It's an accounting term, that's relatively recent (~500 years). It's literally a "concern" about the company's ability to "go" on. A going concern. It could also reference the concerns that are ongoing - namely operational concerns - that need to be addressed.
Not a CPA, but I believe this is incorrect. "Concern" in this context can be read as "business". I would consider the phrase "going concern" to be equivalent to "ongoing business".
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/concern
* A going concern is a business that functions without the threat of liquidation for the foreseeable future, usually regarded as at least within 12 months. *
Note without the threat of liquidation. So there is no concern, which is what makes the term so confusable.
I would guess that "concern" is somehow a synonym with "company" (which happens to work well in Swedish, for instance), that makes it more sensical.
Source: I know nothing about accounting on any level.
I still don't understand: wouldn't "going concern" if it had that origin mean the opposite - i.e. that it was going to fail soon? I would naively say it's "without a going concern" for a stable business.
I, um, don't mean that as a snarky comment or anything; it really is in a lot of ways the best explanation. It's weird and fascinating how words slowly shift over time and how ever though "go" or "concern" never necessarily quite "changed their meaning", it still sometimes wanders a little bit and over the course of centuries it can add up to a surprising amount. Phrases sometimes can get "stuck" and survive past their constituent words having their meanings shift away.
I re-read the post and it does make sense when looking at the term in Wikipedia. It's odd because someone said that it's more of a UK phrase, but being from the UK, I have never heard it before.
The term "going concern" is fairly standard terminology in the accounting world. I'm quite amazed more people haven't come across this term. It's certainly used heavily in the UK when discussing whether or not a business is able to function or not.
For example, "we bought the business as a going concern" would be its use in a typical sentence.
My gut feeling is that these days the phrase is used more commonly in the vernacular in the UK than the US, with US usage being much more restricted to the pure 'business' professions (e.g. managers, accountants, etc), and not so much elsewhere.
Common day-to-day usage to express same would tend more towards more
nebulous or incorrect terms as 'successful/profitable business' or perhaps 'liquid/insolvent', or something like that.
It's definitely "business speak", but I'm surprised anyone with a job like programming doesn't know it. Prior to this, I would have assumed that basically anyone would know the phrase.
Every single Audit performed is required to attest to a companys ability to continue as a going concern. It's very common and well understood industry jargon. As common as 'boolean'.
