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Financial Statement Disclosure Decisions

17 August, 2015 - 15:48
LO1 – Explain the importance of and challenges related to basic financial statement disclosure.
 

Financial statements communicate information, with a focus on the needs of financial statement users such as a company’s investors and creditors. Accounting information should make it easier for management to allocate resources and for shareholders to evaluate management. A key objective of financial statements is to fairly present the entity’s economic resources, obligations, equity, and financial performance.

Fulfilling these objectives is challenging. Accountants must make a number of subjective decisions about how to apply generally accepted accounting principles. For example, they must decide how to measure wealth and how to apply recognition criteria. They must also make practical cost-benefit decisions about how much information is useful to disclose. Some of these decisions are discussed in the following section.