Using financial and non-financial information together in company reporting: A review on Defense industry companies

Information requests of internal and external stakeholders from companies have increased for reasons such as economic and political crises, environmental problems, instability and insecurity against firms and institutions. Financial information has not been able to meet the needs alone in the decision-making processes of company's shareholders, investors and all other internal and external stakeholders. This situation reveals reports which mostly contain non-financial information such as corporate governance report, sustainability report and integrated report in addition to reports such as independent audit report, which mainly contain financial information, and the annual report. It is considered that the reporting approaches of the future will involve presenting all of these financial and non-financial information by associating them with each other. Because the aim in the long term is to benefit of companies, all stakeholders and generally society in economic, social and environmental dimensions. In this thesis, the reporting frameworks applied by the companies will be examined, which of these frameworks the companies use, what financial and non-financial information they explain in these reports and how they relate this information. The fact that the decision-making processes carried out by the stakeholders of the companies based on financial information are affected by non-financial information and therefore companies have started to prepare reports that present two types of information together will be exemplified through global and local companies to be selected from the defense industry sector. There are no rigid, strictly defined frames of templates and rules related to non-financial data. However, since the operational environment, objectives and requirements of the companies in the defence industry sector are similar, it is considered that the non-financial information disclosed by the companies in this sector is evaluated to consist of similar issues and this point has been examined in the last part of the study.