The objectives of financial statements are usually focused on satisfying users’ information
demands which means providing them with quality information for the decision making
process. Needless to mention, there are certain specific and potential constraints of
SMEs' financial reporting. SMEs have the same obligation of preparing financial
statements as the large entities. Hence, they are usually not obligated to prepare a
complete set of financial statements. Most often, they are committed to prepare the
balance sheet, profit and loss account and notes to the financial statements.
Nevertheless, numerous SMEs do not present any internal reports, neither those that are
concerned with historical values or those with forecasting information. Those reports
often do not show enough detailed information. They are mostly prepared annually,
although monthly or quarterly reporting would be more useful. Previous surveys indicate
that most of the SMEs prepare their financial statements for taxation purposes only. In
addition, the majority of SMEs present just the basic financial statements that are
required by some accounting regulation. Only a few of them use that information for the
purpose of liquidity, solvency, activity, economy or profitability analysis. Based on that
information, the users of financial statements could obtain information about the past and
current financial position, identify the current financial problems and predict the future
business trends. Anyway, it would be very useful to analyse their financial statements
additionally. It is important to find out the SMEs’ main financial condition and
performance ratios in order to further investigate the features and dynamics of their
values over a longer period of time.