Introduction

The financial accounts are a closed statistical system capturing the financial relationships within the economy broken-down into institutional sectors and financial instruments. They consist of the opening and closing balance sheets and three flow accounts (the financial account, i.e. the financial transaction account, the revaluation account and the other changes in the volume of assets account). The system is closed with regard to both flows and stocks, i.e. all changes in stocks must be fully accounted for by recorded flows.

The financial accounts supplement the picture of the economic activity by incorporating the data from financial shpere. The accounts aim to provide a better insight into the structure and operation of the financial system and to show the main channels used to obtain and invest financial funds. The financial accounts are an important source of information with broad application in monetary policy analyses as well as financial stability analyses of the whole economy and individual institutional sectors.

• Data
• Commentary

Frequency and responsibility

The financial accounts are compiled at quarterly and annual frequency. The Czech National Bank is responsible for compiling the quarterly financial accounts in the Czech Republic. Data are released 110 days after the reference quarter. The Czech Statistical Office  is responsible for compiling the annual financial accounts. The two institutions set out a cooperation in the domain of statistical data sharing to enable maximum possible harmonisation of these statistics. The ultimate goal is to achieve full consistency where the sum of four quarterly flow accounts is equal to the annual flow accounts and the balance sheet for the fourth quarter is equal to the balance sheet from the annual financial accounts. Similar cooperation is being developed in the area of harmonisation of the non-financial and financial quarterly accounts.

At the EU level, quarterly financial accounts are an integral part of the national accounts. To capture economic activity in the euro area, the ECB is developing a set of quarterly Euro Area Accounts  (EAA) as its key statistical information system. The Euro Area Accounts present harmonised non-financial and financial account statistics. Euro area quarterly financial accounts have been published since 2001 (Monetary Union Financial Accounts – MUFA). The integrated Euro Area quarterly accounts (EAA) have been published since June 2007.

Quarterly financial accounts methodology

The binding regulation for the compilation of financial accounts in EU countries is ESA 95 (European System of Accounts). To some extent this document is of a general nature and in some cases it leaves an option to record financial transactions in several different ways. The Czech National Bank has therefore worked out a more detailed methodology taking into account the data sources available in the Czech Republic and the national legal environment. A user version of this methodology is available to the public (see the link below).

The financial accounts represent a comprehensive system as regards the financial relationships within the economy. Therefore, they are related to a greater or lesser extent to a number of partial statistics monitoring financial linkages (banking statistics, international investment positions, etc.). These statistics are an important data source for the financial accounts. The quarterly financial accounts differ from the standard statistics in several areas:

• the breadth of focus and the scope of the inter-sectoral financial relationships captured,
• the use of data collected by entities outside the central bank,
• higher resort to estimation methods,
• the application of ESA 95 accounting and statistical standards that do not always comply with other statistics published by the central bank (see the methodology for details).

When the statistics are being compiled from the data sources, emphasis is placed on ensuring that the data are consistent across sectors and that the sectors’ financial situations can be compared.

Methodology of FA (pdf, 184 kB)

Please send any requests for more information regarding the financial accounts statistics to fa.stat@cnb.cz .