Abstract:

The difficulty in reading the annual financial statements as other means used by the company to communicate with the economic and financial community resides, as already stated, not only in the syntactic complexity of the documents but also in the possible attempts to make favourable depictions or manipulate the accounting information, in using a technical language that may be difficult to understand by stakeholders and particularly investors who aren’t necessarily trained professionals in the financial and accounting field.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the way that a company may, to a small extent, enrich the economic and financial communication either by adding some accounting information that is not related to its output but to the dynamics of the business sector it operates in, or explain the significance of the technical or financial terms (for instance in a glossary of terms enclosed in the balance sheet and on the company’s website), in order to enhance the economic and financial competencies of the investors, improve the business model and the “learning” model of the company and, consequently, control the impact of the events and scenarios on the economic, financial and patrimonial situation of the company.