Evaluating Corporate Financial Performance

Book excerpt: This textbook offers a step-by-step guide through comprehensive financial statement analysis with real-life case studies for students of financial accounting, financial reporting, and financial statement analysis. Structured into five comprehensive sections, it begins by explaining the content of accounting reports themselves and the three primary financial statements (income statement, balance sheet and cash flow statement). It deciphers the notes to financial statements and demonstrates some classical tools such as ratio analysis and multivariable credit risk models that are useful in a retrospective financial statement analysis. It includes simple step-by-step procedures of a prospective (i.e. future-oriented) financial statement simulation and closes with a comprehensive real-life case study that demonstrates a practical application of the analytical tools discussed earlier in the text. Additionally, the textbook includes online appendices consisting of additional comprehensive real-life case studies (of varying degrees of complexity and dealing with different aspects of a practical financial statement analysis), a set of MS Excel files that contain all major calculations included in tables and charts that appear in the core textbook, and a set of webinars in which the most fundamental parts of the core textbook are discussed in the form of the recorded lectures.