Effects of IFRS on Canadian Cooperatives - Kohonen's Self-Organizing Maps

Cooperatives were viable business enterprises during 20th century pertinent to the market economy in which they have operated. Initially, associate enterprise were created and then renamed as cooperatives. The fundamental difference between publicly accountable enterprises (PAE) and cooperatives are the former is incorporated with an intention of investor-owned public companies where capital is raised in the form of share-issues to public at large. However, cooperatives do not normally raise capital from public except are formed by group of members' and more often keep a low-profile compare to PAE. Indeed, according to Accounting Standard Board (AcSB), where an entity perform business activities and manages financial resources entrusted to it by clients, customers or group of members who are outsiders of the business operations, and do not involved in the enterprise's business activities and also in its operations, for instance enterprises like certain cooperatives are required to adopt International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) as PAE for fiscal year beginning January 1 2011 or earlier - it is a Status Quo and not an option. Further, this study provides an introduction to neutral network application of self-organizing maps (SOM) with financial statements analysis. There will be discussions later under methodology, on how SOM can be used for financial statements analysis of a cooperative: as to discover visualization and clustering from the data set created from Agropur cooperative's annual reports.