From Net Income to Comprehensive Income

The aim of the paper is to compare the utility of the net income and the comprehensive income for the evaluation of financial performance of the company. Traditionally net income was the key performance measure of a business. But over time, accounting standards setters came to believe that net income by itself was an insufficient, and possibly even useless, measure of financial performance. The IASB decision to require the publication of comprehensive income has fed the long time debate regarding the concept of income. In this paper we consider the evaluation of financial performance of the companies through the other comprehensive income. To do this analysis we started with the choices that companies have to do for present profit or loss and other comprehensive income in either: a) a single statement of comprehensive income; or b) two statements: a statement displaying components of profit or loss (an income statement), and a second statement beginning with profit or loss and displaying the components of OCI (a statement of other comprehensive income). For the research we use the data of the consolidated financial statements 2010 published online of companies listed on the Czech Republic Stock Exchange.