Accounting by SMEs – Evidence from Slovenia

The paper aims to investigate the characteristics of financial reporting and management accounting by Slovenian Small and Medium-sized Entities (SMEs), which represent 99.8% of all Slovene enterprises. The paper examines the most important legal bases for external financial reporting of SMEs, rules in national accounting standards and their close linkage with taxation. The paper highlights how Slovenia adopted the relevant European Union (EU) Directives and emphasizes the particularities of the Slovenian environment that demonstrate diversity at the international level. The paper raises issues concerning lenient requirements on accounting practitioners’ qualifications and a lack of supervision of financial statements. We then provide a literature review of relevant studies in the field of financial and management accounting. The financial accounting literature seems to be more developed than that of management accounting. Studies reviewed in this paper mainly focused on the link between financial accounting and taxation, indicating that the use of accounting discretion is motivated by the effort to minimize taxation.