The obligation to maintain accounting and submit financial statements according to the order established by the laws of the Russian Federation is imposed in the Russian Federation on all enterprises and organizations, regardless of their organizational and legal form. Accounting ensures the collection and systematization of complete information about financial and business transactions. Based on the collected and systematized information, financial reporting forms are prepared, including the balance sheet form.
As the concept of «balance sheet» has existed for almost 600 years. Initially, the structure of the balance sheet is based on compliance with the principle of duality. A systematic presentation of the balance sheet using the double entry method was given in the classic work «The Sum of arithmetic, geometry, proportions and proportionality» by the Italian mathematician L. Pacioli, published in 1494 (Pacioli, 1494).
Currently, the balance sheet is a generally accepted statement of the financial position and financial performance of an organization at a certain point in time and includes two parts: assets and liabilities. An asset and a liability are different groupings of the same set of funds of an organization (balance sheet currency). Therefore, the size of the balance sheet assets is always equal to the size of liabilities. Equality of assets and liabilities as a control element is a necessary integral condition for compliance with the balance sheet. At the same time, this condition is not sufficient, since it does not distinguish between the distribution options for assets and liabilities with the same amount of balance sheet currency. Entropy is a new control element that makes it possible to identify systemic differences in the distributions of assets and liabilities. Based on the productive results of the analysis of budget distributions of various economic systems (households, target projects and programs, enterprises, national budgets), we will extend the entropy approach described in the article to the analysis of balance sheets.
