RSPH Blogs - Finances!

Business Lessons From the Streets of India Some of the sharpest business instincts in the world aren't taught in business schools — they're practiced daily by street vendors, hawkers, and small unregistered traders across India's cities. This piece draws on the ideas popularized by Capt. Raghu Raman's well-known talk on India's informal economy, alongside broader observations about how this sector actually operates. The Scale of India's Informal Economy India's unorganized (informal) sector is genuinely massive — by some measures employing roughly 85–90% of the country's total workforce. Its share of GDP is a more contested figure: official National Accounts data has historically put it around 45%, though a 2021 SBI Research study argued that rapid digitization and the growth of the gig economy had pulled that figure down sharply, to somewhere in the 15–20% range by 2020–21. Either way, it's a sector that's easy to underestimate and impossible to...

Learn Accounting: The Easiest Way to Understand the Basics Accounting can feel intimidating at first — a lot of unfamiliar terms, and formulas that don't immediately make sense. But at its core, accounting is really just a system for tracking where money comes from, where it goes, and what a business actually owns versus owes at any given point. Once the core concepts click, the rest builds on top of them fairly naturally. Here's a breakdown of the fundamentals every beginner should understand. What Is Accounting, at Its Core? Accounting is the process of recording, organizing, and summarizing a business's financial transactions — so that anyone looking at the numbers (owners, investors, lenders, tax authorities) can understand the business's financial health. → Related: Learn How to Read a Balance Sheet in 5 Minutes (#16) — a balance sheet is one of the core outputs of the accounting process, so it's worth reading alongside this. The Accounting Equation Everything...