Audit and accounting insights - page 2

Foreign entrepreneurs who want to start their business in Poland may open a branch of their foreign company on the territory of the Republic of Poland, and in this article I will share some insight as to what this branch office and its accounting is like.

The company’s debt ratio is an important criterion for assessing business performance. Even though raising external capital prompts faster growth and boosts your profitability, you must remember that this kind of capital raising involves significant risks. Liquidity hazards seem to be critical here.

With the new digital age technologies, accounting office staff gradually got used to e-mail communication, relying on scanned documents and having more casual connections with tax office staff. The pandemic that has made working from home so popular and has also greatly streamlined the information exchange between accountants and clerks. However, does that mean that digitisation itself is enough to solve all the accounting problems?

When onboarding a new client to your accounting firm, a member of your staff dedicated to support this particular entrepreneur should focus on many things, starting from building a good relationship to implementing proper procedures that will help identify specific needs your client has.

It has been a while since my last post on the principles of accounting, and yet, over this long time I have had a number of discussions about my last blog article that helped me collect so many responses and concerns from my readers that I can now revisit the issues I discussed back then, this time from a slightly different perspective.

In the case of a merger of companies where the existing shareholders do not lose control over companies after the merger, the pooling of interests method referred to in Article 44c of the AA can be applied. In particular, this applies to mergers of direct or indirect subsidiaries of the same parent company, as well as to mergers of a lower-tier parent company and its subsidiary.

Trading companies with similar business profiles often decide to merge in order to grow faster. Mergers are used as a solution to enhance the effectiveness of companies and reduce operating costs, thus achieving synergies.

More and more businesses decide to build their future taking into account the Corporate Social Responsibility – CSR, which certainly works for the benefit of the company image. One of the ways to support local communities may be a donation. If certain conditions are met, a legal person making an in-kind or cash donation may claim an income tax relief. Let’s check then if helping may indeed pay off.

Determining the value of assets and liabilities affects items presented in the balance sheet (statement of financial position of the entity). What is more, it defines the financial result of the company. Given the fact that one of the tasks of accounting is to provide the information about the economic value of the entity, fair value began to be popular both for the initial valuation and for the balance sheet valuation. This valuation parameter, corresponding to the arm’s length value by definition, has become a source of great controversy, mainly due to accounting abuse.

Business operations often involve foreign currency transactions. These transactions should be accounted for in the domestic currency, which means they must be translated, measured and properly presented. This, in turn, raises a number of questions about domestic and international reporting. The regulations found in International Accounting Standard 21 “The Effects of Changes in Foreign Exchange Rates” offer a helping hand here.