Assessing the financial state of construction enterprises

Abstract

The financial state of construction enterprises can be described by a set of criteria evaluating their commercial activity from various perspectives. The most important of them are solvency and financial risk, including the ratio of current assets to current liabilities, the ratio of current assets minus stocks to current liabilities, the ratio of equity to liabilities, the ratio of assets to liabilities and the ratio of current assets to equity. These values indicate how efficiently various resources, i. e. finances, materials, manpower, etc. are used at an enterprise. The criteria characterizing the financial state of an enterprise from various perspectives may change in different directions. Moreover, these criteria are multidimensional. Therefore, a problem of finding a unified approach to describe this conflicting situation arises. The particular criteria describe the particular aspects of a complex object. To obtain an integrated estimate of a considered object, multicriteria evaluation methods are applied. Being versatile, these methods are used for solving various problems. A great number of methods evaluating the performance of multidimensional objects have been created and used recently. Each method has some advantages in describing the particular features of an object. Most methods use various techniques for normalization or transformation of the initial data. In the present investigation seven methods of multicriteria evaluation are applied. The calculations made yielded actually the same results, except those obtained by two methods – the sum of ranks and VIKOR. However, the deviation of the data obtained by using these methods from the average value was small. The priority order of enterprises is finally determined integrating the results obtained by all methods used in the present analysis.