ACCOUNTING POLICIES AND PROCEDURES IN THE PREPARATION OF THE ANNUAL REPORT

摘要

In accordance with Para 14 in the Estonian Accounting Act (AA) all accounting entities are compelled to prepare the annual report for the year ended, which consists of the financial statements and the management report. To ensure that the prepared annual report would meet its purpose the legislative requirements have to be followed and any peculiarities arising from an accounting entity's field of activity should be regulated in the entity's accounting policies and procedures. The objective of the given article is to give an overview about activities required for the preparation of the annual report, alternative accounting policies and accounting estimates, and their presentation in the internal regulations based on companies used as internship bases. The results of the survey revealed that the accounting policies were disclosed according to the rules in the majority of larger internship companies. Inventory taking procedure was established by the internal accounting regulations and implemented in practice in 83% of the companies/organisations that participated in the survey. Based on the results of the survey we may conclude that medium-sized and large enterprises are more likely to be accurate while establishing internal regulations and the related documentation. Micro- and small enterprises showed more deficiencies in working out their internal regulations as well as in the details to which the given rules were followed. The investigation of the documents revealed that the activities required to prepare the annual report are performed in companies and this provides a prerequisite for the annual report to give a true and fair view.