Flow charts
Accounting : financial analysis

The 1982 Chart of Accounts encouraged the development of cash flow statements, thereby improving the financial information available to companies and the analyses that could be drawn from it. However, these cash flow statements have two drawbacks.

• They take a long time to prepare (in many cases, a physical inventory had to be carried out in order to know the value of inventories), and are often only drawn up when the balance sheet is presented, which detracts from their operational value.

• The information contained in these tables does not generally allow them to be used to prevent company failures.

  One item in this table, cash flow, has...