An inventory of financial investments involves a thorough check by external organizations or internal forces of the company for the amount of actually incurred expenses for the purchase and maintenance of securities, as well as the reliability of the data and the correctness of filling out financial documents. As already noted, internal and external inventories can be carried out, that is, specialists or a division of the company itself or special firms specializing in the provision of these types of services. However, the rules and principles for conducting such inspections are the same for everyone.
First of all, I would like to note that financial investments include:
- Securities issued by the state.
- Bonds, checks, bills and other securities of organizations and enterprises.
- Equity participation in the authorized capital of companies.
- Part of the shares of joint stock companies of any type.
- Deposit accounts in commercial banks.
- Accounts receivable, the claims of which have passed under the relevant agreement.
So, at the beginning of the audit, a special commission is created by order of the head of the enterprise. Inventory of financial investments is impossible without first obtaining an inventory list in the context of certain types of financial documents and necessarily in duplicate. Then the experts are engaged in paperwork, checking how reliable and legitimate the presence of securities and other financial documents in the assets.
We can distinguish the main criteria that allow attributing financial instruments to assets:
- The correctness and clarity of execution of documents confirming the company’s right to own them.
- An assessment of how these investments can affect the company's future activities, for example, an assessment of insolvency risk.
- Information disclosing the main economic indicators and types of income that can be obtained in the future from investments of this kind.
In fact, the inventory of financial investments is a long process, as it is necessary to do painstaking work. After all, every security is subject to verification in a grouping by category. The specialist compares the actual availability of financial securities and their number, reflected in the documentation. Particular attention is paid to the real value of such assets and the determination of its current price.
Those securities that are not owned by the company, but are managed by it under a contract granting the right to use, are also subject to verification. In this case, financial investments are recorded based on the price approved by the joint agreement. And the specialist then checks the accuracy and clarity of entering all the necessary information into the book of accounting for financial documents.
As the final part of the inventory, it is possible to distinguish the inclusion of the results of verification in the inventory. Based on this, a check is made of the actual availability of assets and their reflection in the documents. In practice, you can notice a sufficient number of errors made in different periods of financial instrument turnover. That is why the inventory of financial investments is considered a necessary procedure, and the clarity and accuracy of accounting of assets at the enterprise depends on the regularity of its implementation.
As a rule, company employees make the following mistakes or distortions:
- Incorrect filling of documents when processing financial investments;
- assignment of investments to financial assets when there are no relevant grounds for this;
- inaccurate calculation of the initial price of a security;
- incomplete reflection of the profitable part formed by financial investments;
- violation of current legislative standards.