Accountant: The financial statements of a company are the most important documents that a company produces.

Investors, creditors, banks, customers -- everybody reads the statements.

The accounts show what a company does with its money, how profitable it is, and also how risk-worthy it is.

And you can see warning signs for the future. Our stock exchanges depend on properly prepared accounts.

Trader: I agree that the accounts of the companies have a lot of information, but it's very hard to understand it all.

In my job, I need to know the financial situation of a company.

People interested in the stock exchanges rely on experts like me. But there are also many other sources of information.

As for the accounting rules, they don't interest me, or anyone else, at all. That's stuff for the accountants.

Investor: All those numbers, and I haven't got a clue what they all mean.

Pages and pages of them, and apparently they are often 'estimates', so they can be interpreted in one of many ways.