The Comprehensive Guide on How to Read a Financial Report, + Website: Wringing Vital Signs Out of the Numbers - Hardcover

Tracy, John A.; Tracy, Tage C.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1118735714 ISBN 13: 9781118735718

Publisher: Wiley, 2014

Synopsis

A comprehensive guide to reading and understanding financial reports

Financial reports provide vital information to investors, lenders, and managers. Yet, the financial statements in a financial report seem to be written in a foreign language that only accountants can understand. This comprehensive version of How to Read a Financial Report breaks through that language barrier, clears away the fog, and offers a plain-English user's guide to financial reports. The book features new information on the move toward separate financial and accounting reporting standards for private companies, the emergence of websites offering financial information, pending changes in the auditor's report language and what this means to investors, and requirements for XBRL tagging in reporting to the SEC, among other topics.

• Makes it easy to understand what financial reports really say
• Updated to include the latest information financial reporting standards and regulatory changes
• Written by an author team with a combined 50-plus years of experience in financial accounting
• This comprehensive edition includes an ancillary website containing valuable additional resources

With this comprehensive version of How to Read a Financial Report, investors will find everything they need to fully understand the profit, cash flow, and financial condition of any business.

About this title

From the Inside Flap

Whether you're a manager attempting to get a clear picture of your company's performance, an investor trying to determine if a business is a sound investment, or a lender who needs to measure an organization's creditworthiness, the information contained in a financial report is the most valuable source of information at your disposal.

Now only if it was written in a language you could read!

For more than thirty years, the number-one resource professionals have turned to for help in cutting through the haze of accountantese and making sense of all those numbers has been How to Read a Financial Report.

Now this newly updated guide steers you painlessly through the basic accounting concepts and provides line-by-line explanations of a financial statement. It shows you how the three parts of a financial report—the balance sheet, the income statement, and the cash flow statement—fit together and the story they tell. Further, it provides invaluable insight on hot and trending accounting topics, expanded tools to help "root out" questionable and difficult to understand accounting concepts, and an array of tips, tidbits, and traps to take the readers' understanding of financial statements and accounting to the next level.

What make this edition unique are several new features that take you beyond simply understanding financial reports to show you how to apply the information they contain, including:

• A website featuring hotlinks to significant current events, online resources that expand on critical concepts covered, and much more
• A Web-based "Test My Knowledge" section with thorough answers
• Guidelines on how to apply the information contained in reports to identify problems, errors, inconsistencies, and irregularities
• An in-depth case study comparing two companies' performance over several years and showing the role accounting played in their differing outcomes

The Comprehensive Guide on How to Read a Financial Report is your plain-English guide to sorting out what all those numbers are really saying.

From the Back Cover

Praise for How to Read a Financial Report

"What distinguishes Tracy's efforts from other manuals is an innovative structure that visually ties together elements of the balance sheet and income statement by tracing where and how a line item in one affects an entry in another."—Inc.

"An excellent job of showing how to separate the wheat from the chaff without choking in the process."—The Miami Herald

"A wonderful book organized logically and written clearly. For a Fool to be an effective investor, she has to know her way around a financial statement. This book will help you develop that skill. It's the clearest presentation of many accounting concepts that this Fool has seen."—Selena Maranjian, The Motley Fool

Edition details

• Publisher: Wiley
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1118735714
• ISBN 13: 9781118735718
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352