1.3: Financial Statements
This video demonstrates how transactions lead to the creation of financial statements. Vendors, creditors, and investors are only a few of the people who look at and analyze the company's financials. A company's financial statements distill all the economic activities of a company into summarized documents. Learning how to read and analyze financial statements can help you when choosing a company to work for, assessing the long-term prospects of your own company, choosing a company to invest in, and understanding the financial health of companies that play a big role in the community you live in.
Read this article, which walks through the foundational elements of basic accounting and reading financial statements. Some terms have not been covered fully yet, but will be further explained later.
Read each section in this chapter, which explains the purpose of the balance sheet, income statement, and the cash flow statement. It also is a guide to where you will find financials on publicly traded companies. You should get as much practice working on these statements as you can, since they are the fundamental information on any organization. Make the connections between each financial statement. The more you understand the connectivity of these statements, the better understanding you will have of how the entire accounting system works, which is important if you want to understand the overall operations of any company.