Current financial statements are a comprehensive description of the enterprise, which characterize not only their financial and property status, but also the risks and prospects that allows making a comprehensive picture of the market activities. The research paper deals with the study of the essence and the role of financial statements in the process of enterprise management. The objective of this research paper is to establish the necessary content and features of financial statements that would enable to fully meet the needs of managerial staff, while re-maining economical, understandable and sufficient in terms of the content. The authors, through the analysis of the works of recognized scholars, investigated the main approaches to the definition of financial statements, which could allow us to define it as a set of indicators, representing generalized accounting data in the form that fully meets the information needs of the users for the process of managing economic activities. In the process of studying the composition of financial statements, their types are identified, and as a result - their role in the management of the enterprise are determined. The authors present their own vision of the essence of high-quality accounting information and its main characteristics, which can serve as content guidelines when compiling descriptive, non-financial and text parts of financial statements. The proposed approach allows formulating financial statements from the point of view of presentation of our own business on the best side, and in compliance with the regulatory and legal principles and requirements.

One of the most important factors on attracting foreign investors to invest on Tehran Stock Exchange is to have transparent accounting rules and regulations. When there are some consistency between national accounting standards and international accounting standards, we may, at least, expect foreign investors to have better understanding on financial statements. In 2006, there were some changes on Iranian national accounting standards in an attempt to make them closer to international accounting standards. In this study, we select the information of 153 firms five years before and after this regulation and study the effect of convergence from national accounting standards to international accounting standards on foreign direct investment. Using some statistical tests, the study has determined that there was no meaningful relationship between foreign direct investment before and after change on accounting standards. In addition, there was no difference on the information quality before and after change on accounting standards. However, there was some meaningful relationship between the information quality and foreign direct investment.