3 Information needs of different stakeholder groups

An analysis of financial statements should enable users to draw inferences about key areas of their interest. Financial ratios are an important tool to enable financial statement analysis. However, different stakeholders might be interested in understanding and analysing financial statements from different perspectives. Since there is a variation in the information needs of different stakeholder groups, ratios should be calculated whilst taking the information needs of these different stakeholder groups into account. Before reading more about ratio analysis, it might be beneficial to learn about the differences in the information needs of external stakeholders and internal stakeholders.