Financial Statements – Present and Future Scope

The commonly used financial statements–balance sheet, income statement, and statement of changes in cash flows– focus on a firm’s financial structure and performance over a defined period of time. Although they may conform to generally accepted accounting standards they still fail to provide other information that is equally important to achieving true full disclosure. Riahi-Belkaoui proposes remedies for this neglect by taking a close look at other types of statements: the inflation, value added, employee, social performance, and human asset reports. His book is a concise, easily accessed summary of all types of reports, for practitioners, and especially useful as a text or review for students in graduate level courses in financial management and accounting.

The author begins by examining the traditional statements. He shows how they fail to disclose vital information on the measurement and impact of inflation; the measurement of total wealth generated by the total production team, not merely its return to stockholders; necessary information on employees, and about them, that can be useful in management decision making; the measurement of social costs and the benefits attributable to the effects of organizational behavior on the environment, and the measurement of the value of human assets. He takes up these failures and neglects one by one and provides concise discussions of the other, less widely used statements that could remedy them, statements that could provide a fully useful display of an organization’s financial well being, if they were better understood and commonly available.