This article addresses, from the theoretical point of view and through the approaches of different authors, what are the financial statements, which are the best known and who are their users; as a basic competence in the professional training of public accountants in Panama. For the design of the proposal, a literature review was carried out through two phases, a convergent one that consisted of searches in Google Scholar using as keywords: "Financial statements and accounting competencies", without time restrictions. Those selected documents were re-filtered using the relevance of the approaches between conceptions and the usefulness given to users as a criterion. Subsequently, the analysis of the filtered documents was carried out and coincidences between them were identified. A correct analysis of the financial state of the company guides the decision making of the current situation of the company: investment, financing, action plans; as well as predicting its future performance.