Theoretical and Methodological Principles for Accounting Reflecton of Goodwill: Dialectics of Development and Directions of Improvement

The rapid development of market relations, Ukraine’s integration into the world economic space, encourage companies, in order to achieve competitive advantages, to explore new ways of capitalization. At the same time, the operations of purchase, sale, merger or acquisition of companies, the value of which directly depends on intellectual capital, are becoming more common. The difference in the assessment of market and book value of intellectual capital leads to a special economic and accounting category — goodwill.Despite the prospects of using such a component of assets as goodwill, today there are still a number of theoretical and practical problems, for example: problem of unambiguous understanding and interpretation of the essence of goodwill, methods of its valuation, and the practice of reflecting it in accounting and reporting by domestic enterprises.

The study addresses issues related to establishing the nature of goodwill, its content as an intangible economic resource of the enterprise and the component of the value of capital and the problem object of accounting.The purpose of the work is to reveal the economic essence of goodwill as an object of accounting, to conduct a critical analysis of the current standardization of goodwill accounting, to generalize and systematize of existing problems in the formation of accounting information about this object. The task of this study is to formulate separate proposals for improving methodological approaches to accounting for goodwill, which are obtained on the basis of examined legislative and research sources of information. The scientific novelty lies in the substantiation of the accounting category of goodwill as a subjective value and an objectively existing resource, which should be actually reflected in accounting and reporting.