GAAP It stands for Generally Accepted Accounting Principles. GAAP is a cluster of accounting standards and common industry usage that have been developed over many years. It is used by organizations to: 1. Properly organize their financial information into accounting records; 2. Summarize the accounting records into financial statements; and 3. Disclose certain supporting information. One of the reasons for using GAAP is so that anyone reading the financial statements of multiple companies has a reasonable basis for comparison, since all companies using GAAP have created their financial statements using the same set of rules.