Public Sector Accounting in Slovenia and Croatia

The recent financial and economic crisis has intensified the constant challenge countries face to improve the information served by public accounting. The crisis has revealed that accounting based on the accrual principle provides a more transparent and complete overview of business activities and assets than accounting based on the cash principle. The paper analyses and compares the accounting systems in Slovenia and Croatia in order to assess the conditions for transparent and management-oriented financial information, and the progress of the implementation of the accrual principle in budgeting. It reveals that regardless of the stage of accrual implementation in national accounting legislation, the planning and execution of state budgets (that is, budgetary accounting) is still based on the cash principle.