Accounting Earnings

Just because a company reported earnings of a dollar a share doesn't mean that they earned a dollar a share in cash. If they were depreciating a lot of previously spent cash on capital expenditures, it's likely they earned more than a dollar in cash.

The opposite can be true in all kinds of scenarios. When someone whispers "accounting earnings" at a party, a) you should leave, and b) you should note that there is something suspect about the actual earnings number, because when someone has to call out an earnings figure, especially with the A-word, odds are good that something was, in fact, rotten in the state of Denmark. Or at least at that party.