INDEXING FINANCIAL REPORTING INFORMATION FOR HERITAGE MANAGEMENT

The main role of effective heritage management (HM) is to utilize heritage assets while safeguarding them for present and future generations. Proper financial reporting could increase the management capacity in safeguarding these valuable possessions by providing useful information for decision making and management discharge of accountability. In this study we focus on investigating the significance of financial reporting information for the HM practice. We assess how accounting standards comply with user-needs. For this purpose, a measurement tool; disclosure index is developed to identify and assess the significance of financial reporting information for HM. The index is tested quantitatively and qualitatively in Egypt for its huge bequest of heritage. Our results indicate that four financial reporting dimensions of HA; namely performance, accountability, disclosure and narrative are significant for HM, comprising 18 financial reporting items. While the recognition and measurement dimension is found insignificant to the managerial practice. On the international context, the study contributes to the current debate; “determining the appropriate accounting treatment for heritage assets”. This is by identifying user-needs which is the base for determining financial reporting objective. On the country context of Egypt, the results revealed that the appropriate accounting basis for HA is the modified accrual.