BoP accounts. The reserve account records the activity of the nation's central bank. If it is excluded, the BoP can be in surplus (which implies the central bank is building up foreign exchange reserves) or in deficit (which implies the central bank is running down its reserves or borrowing from abroad). The term "balance of payments" is sometimes misused by non-economists to mean just relatively narrow parts of the BoP such as the trade deficit, which means excluding parts of the current account and the entire capital account. Another cause of confusion is the different naming conventions in use. Before 1973 there was no standard way to break down the BoP sheet, with the separation into invisible and visible payments sometimes being the principal divisions. The IMF have their own standards for BoP accounting which is equivalent to the standard definition but uses different nomenclature, in particular with respect to the meaning given to the term capital account. The IMF definition of the Balance of Payments The International Monetary Fund (IMF) use a particular set of definitions for the BoP accounts, which is also used by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and the United Nations System of National Accounts (SNA). The main difference in the IMF's terminology is that it uses the term "financial account" to capture transactions that would under alternative definitions be recorded in the capital account. The IMF uses the term capital account to designate a subset of transactions that, according to other usage, previously formed a small part of the overall current account. The IMF separates these transactions out to form an additional top level division of the BoP accounts. Expressed with the IMF definition, the BoP identity can be written: The IMF uses the term current account with the same meaning as that used by other organizations, although it has its own names for its three leading sub-divisions, which are: The goods and services account (the overall trade balance) The primary income account (factor income such as from loans and investments) The secondary income account (transfer payments) Uses The balance of payments is important in international financial management for the following reasons: First, the balance of payments is a factor in the demand and supply of a country's currency. For example, if outflows exceed inflows, then the demand for the currency in the domestic market is likely to exceed the supply in