Understanding Financial Statements

This accessible book presents conceptual background and analysis tools for understanding and interpreting financial statements while emphasizing financial statement evaluation and using them for business decision-making.

This book helps readers think and reason through complex, real-world situations while emphasizing solutions for unstructured problems, using accounting information for decision-making. Devoting individual chapters to different financial statements, it communicates complex financial accounting and disclosure issues in precise language, avoiding unnecessary detail. Presents the financial statements (annual reports) of actual companies. Incorporates new requirements and changes in accounting and reporting standards. The fifth edition of Understanding Financial Statements has been updated to include new requirements and changes in accounting reporting and standards as well as proposed changes that may affect financial reporting in the future. Provides additional cases which allow readers to explore practical and realistic applications of concepts and analytical tools throughout the book.

Easily accessible -- regardless of the student's background -- this classic text presents the conceptual background and analytical tools necessary to understand and interpret financial statements. The emphasis throughout is on the evaluation of financial statements and their usefulness for business decision-making -- rather than on how the financial statements are constructed.