Understanding Financial Statements

This is the eBook of the printed book and may not include any media, website access codes, or print supplements that may come packaged with the bound book. A supplementary text for a variety of Business courses, including Financial Statement Analysis, Investments, Personal ¿Finance, and Financial Planning and Analysis ¿ An Analytical Approach to Understanding and Interpreting Business Financial Statements ¿ Understanding Financial Statements improves the student’s ability to translate a financial statement into a meaningful map for business decisions. The material covered in each chapter helps students approach financial statements with enhanced confidence and understanding of a firm’s historical, current, and prospective financial condition and performance. The Eleventh Edition includes new case studies based on existing companies and enhanced learning tools to help students quickly grasp and apply the materials. Fraser and Ormiston presents material in an engaging fashion that helps readers make sense of complex financial information, leading to intelligent (and profitable!) decision-making.

The purpose of this book is to help readers understand the basics of understanding financial statements. Material covered includes a step-by-step instruction on how to read and understand the balance sheet, the income statement, and the cash flow statement. It also covers information about how these three statements are interconnected with one another.

Provides the essentials for understanding a company's financial health by explaining how companies formulate their financial documents and how to evaluate financial statements.

Includes an overview of financial statements, an introduction to the accrual concept, explanations of profit and loss, cash flows and balance sheets, and an overview of special inventory valuation and depreciation reporting.

"All investors, from beginners to old hands, should gain from the use of this guide, as I have." From the Introduction by Michael F. Price, president, Franklin Mutual Advisors, Inc. Benjamin Graham has been called the most important investment thinker of the twentieth century. As a master investor, pioneering stock analyst, and mentor to investment superstars, he has no peer. The volume you hold in your hands is Graham's timeless guide to interpreting and understanding financial statements. It has long been out of print, but now joins Graham's other masterpieces, The Intelligent Investor and Security Analysis, as the three priceless keys to understanding Graham and value investing. The advice he offers in this book is as useful and prescient today as it was sixty years ago. As he writes in the preface, "if you have precise information as to a company's present financial position and its past earnings record, you are better equipped to gauge its future possibilities. And this is the essential function and value of security analysis." Written just three years after his landmark Security Analysis, The Interpretation of Financial Statements gets to the heart of the master's ideas on value investing in astonishingly few pages. Readers will learn to analyze a company's balance sheets and income statements and arrive at a true understanding of its financial position and earnings record. Graham provides simple tests any reader can apply to determine the financial health and well-being of any company. This volume is an exact text replica of the first edition of The Interpretation of Financial Statements, published by Harper & Brothers in 1937. Graham's original language has been restored, and readers can be assured that every idea and technique presented here appears exactly as Graham intended. Highly practical and accessible, it is an essential guide for all business people--and makes the perfect companion volume to Graham's investment masterpiece The Intelligent Investor.

Financial statements hold the key to a company's fiscal health—so learn to read them! In order to gauge a company's health—as well as the competition's—managers must know how to properly read and understand financial statements. The Business Owner's Guide to Reading and Understanding Financial Statements will introduce managers and business owners to various types of financial statements and explain why they are important. Serving as a desktop reference, especially for managers without a strong background in finance, this book will discuss the difference between internal and external financial statements and explain how they can be used for financial decision-making in order to avoid common missteps. Whether you're planning for major capital projects or simply managing the fiscal aspects of your department, this nontechnical, results-driven guide will arm you with the fundamentals to: Understand the budget process and why it is important Manage assets and track inventory Gauge profitability Monitor success throughout the year using internal reporting Set prices and make key cost decisions Financial statements are essential to determining a company's fiscal health. Understand where your company stands so that you can make informed decisions about its future.

The late James O. Gill worked as Division Manager and Projects Manager with the Naval Weapons Support Center in Crane, Indiana. He was the author of Financial Basics of Small Business Success, Financial Analysis, and the first edition of Understanding Financial Statements, all published by Crisp Publications, Inc. Jim enjoyed great success teaching financial basics to people with limited financial backgrounds. The new author selected to revise Understanding Financial Statements is Moira E. Chatton. She earned a degree in biochemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, and an M.B.A. from the University of Georgia. Coverage includes- To describe how the three primary financial statements are prepared and what each means to a business. To explain the differences between cash and profit from an accrual prospective. To introduce ratios and proportions and show how easily they are developed and used To explain how to examine and get better productivity from your expenses To provide tested techniques for gaining better control over your business finances.

Description A supplementary text for a variety of Business courses, including Financial Statement Analysis, Investments, Personal Finance, and Financial Planning and Analysis. Fraser and Ormiston take students behind the financial reports to assess the real financial condition and performance of U.S. companies. Understanding Financial Statements, retains its reputation for readability, concise coverage, and accessibility, and gives students the conceptual background and analytical tools necessary to understand and interpret business financial statements. Its ultimate goal is to improve students' ability to translate financial statement numbers into a meaningful map for business decisions and enable each student to approach financial statements with enhanced confidence.

Reveals ways in which businesspeople of all levels can better understand accounting and how to analyze financial data effectively.