Aim. This study aims to substantiate the correlation between the financial management at a small enterprise and the development of small and medium business in general.
Tasks. This study identifies the main problems in the development of small enterprises under modern conditions and analyzes their effect on the system of financial management at an enterprise.
Results. According to the unchanged statistics, throughout the years the number of small enterprises in both Russia and developed countries (United States, members of the European Union) has been above 90% of the total number of organizations, while medium enterprises account for just 2%. This proves that state support measures aimed at combating external factors in order to enhance and develop small and medium business are far from effective. Therefore, it can be concluded that external factors are nor decisive for the development of small enterprises, and the problem itself is internal. It is associated with the personality of the entrepreneurs, their entrepreneurial talent or lack thereof, and their capability of comprehending and processing information flows of the enterprise. Failure to timely detect and solve the informational challenge prevents an entrepreneur from having enough time required for effective management of the enterprise and its finances.
On the other hand, financial management at a small enterprise can be inefficient largely due to the lack of corresponding financial education among entrepreneurs, while most educational resources that are supposed to fill this gap in knowledge are focused primarily on solving the problems of large business. This complicates the perception of information during training courses and often makes the obtained knowledge completely inapplicable to small enterprises. It seems that a positive vector in the development of small enterprises (both in Russia and abroad) and the increased efficiency of financial management at small enterprises can be achieved by solving the two aforementioned problems, i.e. by overcoming the “informational challenge” and by changing the methods of teaching financial disciplines that would provide the required professional knowledge in the field of financial management to entrepreneurs.
Keywords
Financial management, entrepreneurship, small enterprise development, informational challenge, teaching financial disciplines.