There are many problems that can eat your assets and are not in the B/S. I don't thing that creative accounting is very likely, especially in well established C

There are many problems that can eat your assets and are not in the B/S. I don't thing that creative accounting is very likely, especially in well established Corporations. One scarier issue might be law suits. But you can keep an eye on "easy" things like cash flow. A company that can run on 100M of cash and produces 1B of cash per year is very unlikely going to go so under that it won't be able to pay its creditors, for example.