The Role of Information for Recognising Business Opportunities

Managers need a lot of knowledge and information to make decisions and recognize business opportunities. They can acquire this knowledge and information in different ways. Accounting information, particularly information relating to the creditworthiness of business partners and competitors, is important. Such information, which can contain non-accounting information, is often derived from annual reports. The fastest and cheapest way of accessing information is via the Internet. Because searching for information about different businesses on their Web sites can be time consuming, a quicker, more efficient option is to access this information on databases that contain useful information relating to the majority of businesses in the country. In this paper, we discuss the importance of knowledge and information for recognizing business opportunities. We also analyze the appropriateness of accounting information available from five of the most widely used databases concerning Slovene and Croatian businesses, for estimating the creditworthiness of businesses.