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Jul 16 2023
Financial Statement Analysis: How Its Done by Statement Type

Financial Statement Analysis: How It’s Done, by Statement Type

What Is Financial Statement Analysis?

Financial statement analysis is the process of analyzing a company’s financial statements for decision-making purposes. External stakeholders use it to understand the overall health of an organization and to evaluate financial performance and business value. Internal constituents use it as a monitoring tool for managing the finances.

Key Takeaways

  • Financial statement analysis is used by internal and external stakeholders to evaluate business performance and value.
  • Financial accounting calls for all companies to create a balance sheet, income statement, and cash flow statement, which form the basis for financial statement analysis.
  • Horizontal, vertical, and ratio analysis are three techniques that analysts use when analyzing financial statements.

Financial Statement Analysis

How to Analyze Financial Statements

The financial statements of a company record important financial data on every aspect of a business’s activities. As such, they can be evaluated on the basis of past, current, and projected performance.

In general, financial statements are centered around generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) in the United States. These principles require a company to create and maintain three main financial statements: the balance sheet, the income statement, and the cash flow statement. Public companies have stricter standards for financial statement reporting. Public companies must follow GAAP, which requires accrual accounting. Private companies have greater flexibility in their financial statement preparation and have the option to use either accrual or cash accounting.

Several techniques are commonly used as part of financial statement analysis. Three of the most important techniques are horizontal analysis, vertical analysis, and ratio analysis. Horizontal analysis compares data horizontally, by analyzing values of line items across two or more years. Vertical analysis looks at the vertical effects that line items have on other parts of the business and the business’s proportions. Ratio analysis uses important ratio metrics to calculate statistical relationships.

Types of Financial Statements

Companies use the balance sheet, income statement, and cash flow statement to manage the operations of their business and to provide transparency to their stakeholders. All three statements are interconnected and create different views of a company’s activities and performance.

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Balance Sheet

The balance sheet is a report of a company’s financial worth in terms of book value. It is broken into three parts to include a company’s assets, liabilities, and shareholder equity. Short-term assets such as cash and accounts receivable can tell a lot about a company’s operational efficiency; liabilities include the company’s expense arrangements and the debt capital it is paying off; and shareholder equity includes details on equity capital investments and retained earnings from periodic net income. The balance sheet must balance assets and liabilities to equal shareholder equity. This figure is considered a company’s book value and serves as an important performance metric that increases or decreases with the financial activities of a company.

Income Statement

The income statement breaks down the revenue that a company earns against the expenses involved in its business to provide a bottom line, meaning the net profit or loss. The income statement is broken into three parts that help to analyze business efficiency at three different points. It begins with revenue and the direct costs associated with revenue to identify gross profit. It then moves to operating profit, which subtracts indirect expenses like marketing costs, general costs, and depreciation. Finally, after deducting interest and taxes, the net income is reached.

Basic analysis of the income statement usually involves the calculation of gross profit margin, operating profit margin, and net profit margin, which each divide profit by revenue. Profit margin helps to show where company costs are low or high at different points of the operations.

Cash Flow Statement

The cash flow statement provides an overview of the company’s cash flows from operating activities, investing activities, and financing activities. Net income is carried over to the cash flow statement, where it is included as the top line item for operating activities. Like its title, investing activities include cash flows involved with firm-wide investments. The financing activities section includes cash flow from both debt and equity financing. The bottom line shows how much cash a company has available.

Free Cash Flow and Other Valuation Statements

Companies and analysts also use free cash flow statements and other valuation statements to analyze the value of a company. Free cash flow statements arrive at a net present value by discounting the free cash flow that a company is estimated to generate over time. Private companies may keep a valuation statement as they progress toward potentially going public.

Financial Performance

Financial statements are maintained by companies daily and used internally for business management. In general, both internal and external stakeholders use the same corporate finance methodologies for maintaining business activities and evaluating overall financial performance.

When doing comprehensive financial statement analysis, analysts typically use multiple years of data to facilitate horizontal analysis. Each financial statement is also analyzed with vertical analysis to understand how different categories of the statement are influencing results. Finally, ratio analysis can be used to isolate some performance metrics in each statement and bring together data points across statements collectively.

Below is a breakdown of some of the most common ratio metrics:

  • Balance sheet: This includes asset turnover, quick ratio, receivables turnover, days to sales, debt to assets, and debt to equity.
  • Income statement: This includes gross profit margin, operating profit margin, net profit margin, tax ratio efficiency, and interest coverage.
  • Cash flow: This includes cash and earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA). These metrics may be shown on a per-share basis.
  • Comprehensive: This includes return on assets (ROA) and return on equity (ROE), along with DuPont analysis.

What are the advantages of financial statement analysis?

Financial statement analysis evaluates a company’s performance or value through a company’s balance sheet, income statement, or statement of cash flows. By using a number of techniques, such as horizontal, vertical, or ratio analysis, investors may develop a more nuanced picture of a company’s financial profile.

What are the different types of financial statement analysis?

Most often, analysts will use three main techniques for analyzing a company’s financial statements.

First, horizontal analysis involves comparing historical data. Usually, the purpose of horizontal analysis is to detect growth trends across different time periods.

Second, vertical analysis compares items on a financial statement in relation to each other. For instance, an expense item could be expressed as a percentage of company sales.

Finally, ratio analysis, a central part of fundamental equity analysis, compares line-item data. Price-to-earnings (P/E) ratios, earnings per share, or dividend yield are examples of ratio analysis.

What is an example of financial statement analysis?

An analyst may first look at a number of ratios on a company’s income statement to determine how efficiently it generates profits and shareholder value. For instance, gross profit margin will show the difference between revenues and the cost of goods sold. If the company has a higher gross profit margin than its competitors, this may indicate a positive sign for the company. At the same time, the analyst may observe that the gross profit margin has been increasing over nine fiscal periods, applying a horizontal analysis to the company’s operating trends.

 

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Kalinka Infotech 3 Comments
Jun 29 2023
How to Successfully Handle Your Companys Finance Efficiently

In business, finance management is the practice of handling a company’s finances in a way that allows it to be successful and compliant with regulations. That takes both a high-level plan and boots-on-the-ground execution.

What Is Financial Management?

At its core, financial management is the practice of making a business plan and then ensuring all departments stay on track. Solid financial management enables the CFO or VP of finance to provide data that supports creation of a long-range vision, informs decisions on where to invest, and yields insights on how to fund those investments, liquidity, profitability, cash runway and more.

ERP software can help finance teams achieve these goals: A financial management system combines several financial functions, such as accounting, fixed-asset management, revenue recognition and payment processing. By integrating these key components, a financial management system ensures real-time visibility into the financial state of a company while facilitating day-to-day operations, like period-end close processes.

Objectives of Financial Management

Building on those pillars, financial managers help their companies in a variety of ways, including but not limited to:

Maximizing profits

Provide insights on, for example, rising costs of raw materials that might trigger an increase in the cost of goods sold.

Tracking liquidity and cash flow

Ensure the company has enough money on hand to meet its obligations.

Ensuring compliance

Keep up with state, federal and industry-specific regulations.

Developing financial scenarios

These are based on the business’ current state and forecasts that assume a wide range of outcomes based on possible market conditions.

Manage relationships

Dealing effectively with investors and the boards of directors.

Ultimately, it’s about applying effective management principles to the company’s financial structure.

Scope of Financial Management

Financial management encompasses four major areas:

  1. Planning

    The financial manager projects how much money the company will need in order to maintain positive cash flow, allocate funds to grow or add new products or services and cope with unexpected events, and shares that information with business colleagues.

    Planning may be broken down into categories including capital expenses, T&E and workforce and indirect and operational expenses.

  2. Budgeting

    The financial manager allocates the company’s available funds to meet costs, such as mortgages or rents, salaries, raw materials, employee T&E and other obligations. Ideally there will be some left to put aside for emergencies and to fund new business opportunities.

    Companies generally have a master budget and may have separate sub documents covering, for example, cash flow and operations; budgets may be static or flexible.

    Static vs. Flexible Budgeting

    StaticFlexible
    Remains the same even if there are significant changes from the assumptions made during planning.Adjusts based on changes in the assumptions used in the planning process.

  3. Managing and assessing risk

    Line-of-business executives look to their financial managers to assess and provide compensating controls for a variety of risks, including:

    • Market riskAffects the business’ investments as well as, for public companies, reporting and stock performance. May also reflect financial risk particular to the industry, such as a pandemic affecting restaurants or the shift of retail to a direct-to-consumer model.
    • Credit riskThe effects of, for example, customers not paying their invoices on time and thus the business not having funds to meet obligations, which may adversely affect creditworthiness and valuation, which dictates ability to borrow at favorable rates.
    • Liquidity riskFinance teams must track current cash flow, estimate future cash needs and be prepared to free up working capital as needed.
    • Operational riskThis is a catch-all category, and one new to some finance teams. It may include, for example, the risk of a cyber-attack and whether to purchase cybersecurity insurance, what disaster recovery and business continuity plans are in place and what crisis management practices are triggered if a senior executive is accused of fraud or misconduct.

  4. Procedures

    The financial manager sets procedures regarding how the finance team will process and distribute financial data, like invoices, payments and reports, with security and accuracy. These written procedures also outline who is responsible for making financial decisions at the company — and who signs off on those decisions.

    Companies don’t need to start from scratch; there are policy and procedure templates available for a variety of organization types, such as this one for nonprofits.

Functions of Financial Management

More practically, a financial manager’s activities in the above areas revolve around planning and forecasting and controlling expenditures.

The FP&A function includes issuing P&L statements, analyzing which product lines or services have the highest profit margin or contribute the most to net profitability, maintaining the budget and forecasting the company’s future financial performance and scenario planning.

Managing cash flow is also key. The financial manager must make sure there’s enough cash on hand for day-to-day operations, like paying workers and purchasing raw materials for production. This involves overseeing cash as it flows both in and out of the business, a practice called cash management.

Along with cash management, financial management includes revenue recognition, or reporting the company’s revenue according to standard accounting principles. Balancing accounts receivable turnover ratios is a key part of strategic cash conservation and management. This may sound simple, but it isn’t always: At some companies, customers might pay months after receiving your service. At what point do you consider that money “yours” — and report the good news to investors?

5 Tips to Improve Your Accounts Receivable Turnover Ratio

  1. Invoice regularly and accurately. If invoices don’t go out on time, money will not come in on time.
  1. Always state payment terms. You can’t enforce policies that you haven’t communicated to clients. If you make changes, call them out.
  1. Offer multiple ways to pay. New B2B options are coming online. Have you considered a payment gateway?
  1. Set follow-up reminders. Don’t wait until customers are in arrears to start collection procedures. Be proactive, but not annoying, with reminders.
  1. Consider offering discounts for cash and prepayments. Cash(less) is king in retail, and you can reduce AR costs by encouraging customers to pay ahead rather than on your normal customer credit terms.
Learn more about maximizing your AR turnover ratios.

Finally, managing financial controls involves analyzing how the company is performing financially compared with its plans and budgets. Methods for doing this include financial ratio analysis, in which the financial manager compares line items on the company’s financial statements.

Strategic vs. Tactical Financial Management

On a tactical level, financial management procedures govern how you process daily transactions, perform the monthly financial close, compare actual spending to what’s budgeted and ensure you meet auditor and tax requirements.

On a more strategic level, financial management feeds into vital FP&A (financial planning and analysis) and visioning activities, where finance leaders use data to help line-of-business colleagues plan future investments, spot opportunities and build resilient companies.

The 6 Ways to Grow a Company

 

Importance of Financial Management

Solid financial management provides the foundation for three pillars of sound fiscal governance:

  1. Strategizing

    Identifying what needs to happen financially for the company to achieve its short- and long-term goals. Leaders need insights into current performance for scenario planning, for example.

  2. Decision-making

    Helping business leaders decide the best way to execute on plans by providing up-to-date financial reports and data on relevant KPIs.

  3. Controlling

    Ensuring each department is contributing to the vision and operating within budget and in alignment with strategy.

With effective financial management, all employees know where the company is headed, and they have visibility into progress.

What Are the Three Types of Financial Management?

The functions above can be grouped into three broader types of financial management:

  1. Capital budgeting

    Relates to identifying what needs to happen financially for the company to achieve its short- and long-term goals. Where should capital funds be expended to support growth?

  2. Capital structure

    Determine how to pay for operations and/or growth. If interest rates are low, taking on debt might be the best answer. A company might also seek funding from a private equity firm, consider selling assets like real estate or, where applicable, selling equity.

  3. Working capital management

    As discussed above, is making sure there’s enough cash on hand for day-to-day operations, like paying workers and purchasing raw materials for production.

What Is an Example of Financial Management?

We’ve covered some examples of financial management in the “functions” section above. Now, let’s cover how they all work together:

Say the CEO of a toothpaste company wants to introduce a new product: toothbrushes. She’ll call on her team to estimate the cost of producing the toothbrushes and the financial manager to determine where those funds should come from — for example, a bank loan.

The financial manager will acquire those funds and ensure they’re allocated to manufacture toothbrushes in the most cost-effective way possible. Assuming the toothbrushes sell well, the financial manager will gather data to help the management team decide whether to put the profits toward producing more toothbrushes, start a line of mouthwashes, pay a dividend to shareholders or take some other action.

Throughout the process, the financial manager will ensure the company has enough cash on hand to pay the new workers producing the toothbrushes. She’ll also analyze whether the company is spending and generating as much money as she estimated when she budgeted for the project.

Financial Management for Startups

At the outset, financial management responsibilities within a startup include making and sticking to a budget that aligns with the business plan, evaluating what to do with profits and making sure your bills get paid and that customers pay you.

As the company grows and adds finance and accounting contractors or staffers, financial management gets more complicated. You need to make sure your employees get paid, with accurate deductions; properly file taxes and financial statements; and watch for errors and fraud.

This all circles back to our opening discussion of balancing strategic and tactical. By building a plan, you can answer the big questions: Are our goods and services profitable? Can we afford to launch a new product or make that hire? What might the coming 12 to 18 months bring for the business?

Solid financial management provides the systems and processes to answer those questions.

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Kalinka Infotech 4 Comments
Jun 27 2023
A Deep Dive into Financial Analysis: Definition, Importance, and Practical Applications

What Is Financial Analysis?

Financial analysis is the process of evaluating businesses, projects, budgets, and other finance-related transactions to determine their performance and suitability. Typically, financial analysis is used to analyze whether an entity is stable, solvent, liquid, or profitable enough to warrant a monetary investment.

Key Takeaways

  • If conducted internally, financial analysis can help fund managers make future business decisions or review historical trends for past successes.
  • If conducted externally, financial analysis can help investors choose the best possible investment opportunities.
  • Fundamental analysis and technical analysis are the two main types of financial analysis.
  • Fundamental analysis uses ratios and financial statement data to determine the intrinsic value of a security.
  • Technical analysis assumes a security’s value is already determined by its price, and it focuses instead on trends in value over time.

Understanding Financial Analysis

Financial analysis is used to evaluate economic trends, set financial policy, build long-term plans for business activity, and identify projects or companies for investment. This is done through the synthesis of financial numbers and data. A financial analyst will thoroughly examine a company’s financial statements—the income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow statement. Financial analysis can be conducted in both corporate finance and investment finance settings.

One of the most common ways to analyze financial data is to calculate ratios from the data in the financial statements to compare against those of other companies or against the company’s own historical performance.

For example, return on assets (ROA) is a common ratio used to determine how efficient a company is at using its assets and as a measure of profitability. This ratio could be calculated for several companies in the same industry and compared to one another as part of a larger analysis.

 

There is no single best financial analytic ratio or calculation. Most often, analysts use a combination of data to arrive at their conclusion.

Corporate Financial Analysis

In corporate finance, the analysis is conducted internally by the accounting department and shared with management in order to improve business decision making. This type of internal analysis may include ratios such as net present value (NPV) and internal rate of return (IRR) to find projects worth executing.

Many companies extend credit to their customers. As a result, the cash receipt from sales may be delayed for a period of time. For companies with large receivable balances, it is useful to track days sales outstanding (DSO), which helps the company identify the length of time it takes to turn a credit sale into cash. The average collection period is an important aspect of a company’s overall cash conversion cycle.

A key area of corporate financial analysis involves extrapolating a company’s past performance, such as net earnings or profit margin, into an estimate of the company’s future performance. This type of historical trend analysis is beneficial to identify seasonal trends.

For example, retailers may see a drastic upswing in sales in the few months leading up to Christmas. This allows the business to forecast budgets and make decisions, such as necessary minimum inventory levels, based on past trends.

Investment Financial Analysis

In investment finance, an analyst external to the company conducts an analysis for investment purposes. Analysts can either conduct a top-down or bottom-up investment approach. A top-down approach first looks for macroeconomic opportunities, such as high-performing sectors, and then drills down to find the best companies within that sector. From this point, they further analyze the stocks of specific companies to choose potentially successful ones as investments by looking last at a particular company’s fundamentals.

A bottom-up approach, on the other hand, looks at a specific company and conducts a similar ratio analysis to the ones used in corporate financial analysis, looking at past performance and expected future performance as investment indicators. Bottom-up investing forces investors to consider microeconomic factors first and foremost. These factors include a company’s overall financial health, analysis of financial statements, the products and services offered, supply and demand, and other individual indicators of corporate performance over time.

 

Financial analysis is only useful as a comparative tool. Calculating a single instance of data is usually worthless; comparing that data against prior periods, other general ledger accounts, or competitor financial information yields useful information.

Types of Financial Analysis

There are two types of financial analysis: fundamental analysis and technical analysis.

Fundamental Analysis

Fundamental analysis uses ratios gathered from data within the financial statements, such as a company’s earnings per share (EPS), in order to determine the business’s value. Using ratio analysis in addition to a thorough review of economic and financial situations surrounding the company, the analyst is able to arrive at an intrinsic value for the security. The end goal is to arrive at a number that an investor can compare with a security’s current price in order to see whether the security is undervalued or overvalued.

Technical Analysis

Technical analysis uses statistical trends gathered from trading activity, such as moving averages (MA). Essentially, technical analysis assumes that a security’s price already reflects all publicly available information and instead focuses on the statistical analysis of price movements. Technical analysis attempts to understand the market sentiment behind price trends by looking for patterns and trends rather than analyzing a security’s fundamental attributes.

Horizontal vs. Vertical Analysis

When reviewing a company’s financial statements, two common types of financial analysis are horizontal analysis and vertical analysis. Both use the same set of data, though each analytical approach is different.

Horizontal analysis entails selecting several years of comparable financial data. One year is selected as the baseline, often the oldest. Then, each account for each subsequent year is compared to this baseline, creating a percentage that easily identifies which accounts are growing (hopefully revenue) and which accounts are shrinking (hopefully expenses).

Vertical analysis entails choosing a specific line item benchmark, then seeing how every other component on a financial statement compares to that benchmark. Most often, net sales is used as the benchmark. A company would then compare cost of goods sold, gross profit, operating profit, or net income as a percentage to this benchmark. Companies can then track how the percent changes over time.

Examples of Financial Analysis

In the nine-month period ending Sept. 30, 2022, Amazon.com reported a net loss of $3 billion. This was a substantial decline from one year ago where the company reported net income of over $19 billion.

Amazon.com, Q3 2022 Statement of Operations.

Financial analysis shows some interesting facets of the company’s earnings per share (shown above. On one hand, the company’s EPS through the first three quarters was -$0.29; compared to the prior year, Amazon earned $1.88 per share. This dramatic difference was not present looking only at the third quarter of 2022 compared to 2021. Though EPS did decline from one year to the next, the company’s EPS for each third quarter was comparable ($0.31 per share vs. $0.28 per share).

Analysts can also use the information above to perform corporate financial analysis. For example, consider Amazon’s operating profit margins below.

  • 2022: $9,511 / $364,779 = 2.6%
  • 2021: $21,419 / $332,410 = 6.4%

From Q3 2021 to Q3 2022, the company experienced a decline in operating margin, allowing for financial analysis to reveal that the company simply earns less operating income for every dollar of sales.

Why Is Financial Analysis Useful?

The financial analysis aims to analyze whether an entity is stable, liquid, solvent, or profitable enough to warrant a monetary investment. It is used to evaluate economic trends, set financial policies, build long-term plans for business activity, and identify projects or companies for investment.

How Is Financial Analysis Done?

Financial analysis can be conducted in both corporate finance and investment finance settings. A financial analyst will thoroughly examine a company’s financial statements—the income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow statement.

One of the most common ways to analyze financial data is to calculate ratios from the data in the financial statements to compare against those of other companies or against the company’s own historical performance. A key area of corporate financial analysis involves extrapolating a company’s past performance, such as net earnings or profit margin, into an estimate of the company’s future performance.

What Techniques Are Used in Conducting Financial Analysis?

Analysts can use vertical analysis to compare each component of a financial statement as a percentage of a baseline (such as each component as a percentage of total sales). Alternatively, analysts can perform horizontal analysis by comparing one baseline year’s financial results to other years.

Many financial analysis techniques involve analyzing growth rates including regression analysis, year-over-year growth, top-down analysis such as market share percentage, or bottom-up analysis such as revenue driver analysis.

Last, financial analysis often entails the use of financial metrics and ratios. These techniques include quotients relating to the liquidity, solvency, profitability, or efficiency (turnover of resources) of a company.

What Is Fundamental Analysis?

Fundamental analysis uses ratios gathered from data within the financial statements, such as a company’s earnings per share (EPS), in order to determine the business’s value. Using ratio analysis in addition to a thorough review of economic and financial situations surrounding the company, the analyst is able to arrive at an intrinsic value for the security. The end goal is to arrive at a number that an investor can compare with a security’s current price in order to see whether the security is undervalued or overvalued.

What Is Technical Analysis?

Technical analysis uses statistical trends gathered from market activity, such as moving averages (MA). Essentially, technical analysis assumes that a security’s price already reflects all publicly available information and instead focuses on the statistical analysis of price movements. Technical analysis attempts to understand the market sentiment behind price trends by looking for patterns and trends rather than analyzing a security’s fundamental attributes.

The Bottom Line

Financial analysis is a cornerstone of making smarter, more strategic decisions based on the underlying financial data of a company. Whether corporate, investment, or technical analysis, analysts use data to explore trends, understand growth, seek areas of risk, and support decision-making. Financial analysis may include investigating financial statement changes, calculating financial ratios, or exploring operating variances.

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