Financial Statements
Accounting is a means of keeping track of a firm's financial transactions. There are two different types of accounting, financial and managerial. Financial accounting focuses on the construction of financial statements with the intention of providing an accurate overview of the firm's financial condition. The four major financial statements are the income statement, the balance sheet, the statement of changes in owner's equity and the statement of cash flows (Singer, 2007). Each of these four serves its own purpose. The income statement and balance sheet are the main statements, but the cash flow statement is important because sometimes it is valuable and necessary to separate out the non-cash transactions from the income statement; additionally the cash transactions are broken down into different types. For shareholder's, the statement of changes in owner's equity is a valuable statement to illustrate what happened to the book value of the owner's equity over the course of the period.
The four basic financial statements are related to one another for the user but they are also related to one another in their construction. The four statements are aggregate reports of financial activity. Each transaction that a firm undertakes is noted, and the all of this activity is compiled in the financial statements. So underlying each of the different financial statements are the total transactions that the firm has undertaken...
Financial Statements: Accounting Accounting: Financial Statements Are the assets included under the company's assets listed in the proper order? Explain your answer. When it comes to the listing of current assets in a balance sheet, it is their liquidity that is taken into consideration. In that regard therefore, the assets that would ordinarily be turned into cash quickly come first. Looking at the company's current assets, one would conclude that based on my
Accounting The role of financial statements in investing is that they provide a consistent format that can be used by potential investors and other stakeholders to evaluate a company. There are several components that facilitate this happening. For publicly-traded firms, Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) play a key role in the creation of financial statements. GAAP is a common set of accounting principles and procedures that companies use to compile their
Accounting Qualitative Characteristics of Financial Statements There are four principal qualitative characteristics that make the information provided in financial statements useful to users. These are understandability, relevance, reliability and comparability. The first section of this paper will be dedicated to explaining each of these concepts and how they relate to making financial statements more valuable for the audience. The first principal qualitative characteristic is understandability. This relates not only to the information but
Financial Statements All publicly-traded firms are required to produce financial statements. These statements are produced according to standardized guidelines, and their production is an essential component to the efficient function of modern capital markets in the west. This paper will discuss the nature of financial accounting statements, and will provide insight into how these statements provide a benefit to different stakeholder groups, both internal and external. The production of consistent, reliable financial
I agree with Harper (2009) on this, as well. Just scratching the surface of the financial statements will not help a person who is trying to invest in a company, because, as is often said, the devil is in the details. Something can look incredibly good on the first page and simply be terrible as one digs deeper into it. There might also be issues that a company has and
Working capital reduction is not always a bad thing -- tightening receivables and inventory turns is often considered to be good financial policy. In the case of Unilever, it is important to synthesize the two statements. We can see, for example, that "unusual expense" is the category most responsible for the change in working capital. At this point, it would be advisable to delve deeper into the comments in the
Our semester plans gives you unlimited, unrestricted access to our entire library of resources —writing tools, guides, example essays, tutorials, class notes, and more.
Get Started Now