The expansion of opportunities and the disappearance of country borders make the answering the question increasingly urgent that which country’s or region’s acts and customs as precedents the accounting created for measuring the economic performance should use in the future. The fact makes this question especially interesting that these acts and customs often differ from each other significantly even within a region. The objective of the study is to introduce the major accounting systems (US GAAP, EU directives, IFRS) and their supporting institutional background in a conception way with a special regard on compiling financial statements on the basis of IFRS. The accounts should include not only validity but the preciseness expected by both the owners and the creditors focusing on consistency, the usefulness, transparency and unambiguousness of the contained pieces of information. All these are especially important when a given enterprise or an enterprise-group represents itself in several countries or continents. The actuality of the topic is strengthened by the fact that more and more entities being interested even in abroad require to use a system based on internationally accepted standards as a basis when compiling annual accounts and consolidation for the sake of comparability.