Profit Blog

Jarmo Manninen & Muutosdraiveri Oy


What is the gap of ignorance about a company's financial situation?

14. maaliskuuta 2025

In Finland, company accounting is a statutory requirement. The Finnish Accounting Act requires that all companies, regardless of their size or industry, maintain accurate and up-to-date accounting records. This applies to both sole proprietors and larger companies. The purpose of accounting is to ensure the transparency of a company's finances, assist with taxation and provide information about the company's financial situation. Section 1:10.3 (Chapter 1, Section 10, Paragraph 3) of the Accounting Decree sets out the minimum requirements for what must be presented in a company's income statement. However, accountants want to present companies' external accounting income statements in accordance with the income statement models set out in sections 1:1 -1:5 of the Accounting Decree, so that the work of accountants is as consistent as possible from one company to another.

Although the accounting regulation allows companies to define the content of the income statement to serve the company's performance reporting needs, companies are typically not aware of this and do not know how to present their performance reporting needs to accountants. In other words, the gap of ignorance arises from the fact that accountants do not know enough about the business of their client companies and client companies do not know enough about the accounting opportunities of companies.

The income statement of external accounting related to a company's accounting is not sufficient for the financial operational management of a company, because the income statement of external accounting only shows the consequences of the company's operations on a general level in the form of an income statement. The income statement of external accounting does not tell us what the root causes of the company's profitability problems are or what the root causes of the deviations of the company's actual performance figures from the budgeted target figures are. The gap in knowledge I mentioned above also results in the fact that accountants are not able to advise companies on how to build profitability monitoring into their companies, depending on the company's business, for example by product, service, project, customer and business function. On the other hand, companies are not even able to request advice from their accountants on how to implement these.

Is there a need for development in your company in the areas I mentioned above?

I encourage you to share this blog post of mine on social media. If you have any suggestions for the topics of the next blog posts, I will gladly accept them.

I hope that you were interested in this matter and that you can continue to be involved.


I have written four books on creating the conditions for the company's financial management, and they are available in well-stocked bookstores and online bookstores in Finland, for example from BoD (Books On Demand) at:








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