Essential and non-essential items of accounting (financial) statements

The Russian Ministry of Finance, as the state regulator of accounting, annually discloses new aspects of improving accounting (financial) reporting, including through the adoption of new Federal Accounting Standards. The latest of these standards was the Federal Accounting Standard 4/2023 “Accounting (Financial) Reporting”, which comes into force with the reporting for 2025. The new standard introduced an important innovation in the composition of reporting items — it defined the minimum list of items in the reporting forms, and listed the items that can be included in the reporting forms if a specific reporting organization has the relevant accounting items. In addition, their relevance is important to expand the minimum list of articles. But the articles from the minimum list may be insignificant. In this case, whether they should be excluded from the reporting forms turned out to be such an important issue that the Non-governmental Accounting Regulator, the Accounting Methodological Center, decided to develop a separate Recommendation on this topic. When conducting research, we used such methods as analysis and synthesis, comparison, grouping method, analogy method, logical approach, system approach. As a result of the conducted research, this article, in particular, presents generalized requirements for a minimum list of articles in case of their insignificance. The results of this study will be of interest to a wide range of readers studying various problems of modern Russian accounting, and can also be used in the educational process of higher education institutions.