Abstract. The current paper sets to develop a methodology for assessing the bankruptcy risk for Romanian companies based on the solvency ratio. A previous study performed over a paired sample of 1176 Romanian companies showed that the solvency ratio had potential for predicting bankruptcy, but was not able to set a benchmark because of the differences between the structure of the paired sample and the structure of the population. The present research was performed over a larger sample, that included 53252 yearly financial statements and that was similar in structure to the entire population of Romanian companies. The results allow for the proposal of a methodology for assessing the bankruptcy risk based on risk classes.

Keywords: ratio analysis, financial statements, corporate finance, accuracy, benchmark, risk classes.