Here's what you'll learn: • Financial reporting • Balance statements • Income statements • Statement of cash flows • Statement of Retained Earnings • Ratios • Financial Analysis This course explains how to read and interpret the financial statements of a business enterprise. It is not an accounting course and it is written by a non-accountant for non-accountants. The purpose of the financial statements of a company is to provide information on the profitability and economic well-being of the organization. Accounting and the corresponding financial statements are the “language of business” and allow business owners, investors, bankers, and others to understand how the business is doing. Everyday hundreds of financial transactions take place in the normal course of business and without some mechanism to compile and organize the transactions they would just be a mindnumbing jumble of data. To bring order to this chaos, accountants developed standard reporting guidelines for business data. The guidelines allow us to summarize a large number of transactions into groupings of similar transactions. The standard reporting format includes three primary reports: The Balance Sheet, the Income Statement, and a Statement of Cash Flows. Sometimes other reports are included such as a Statement of Retained Earnings. To insure consistency, the reports must comply with guidelines known as Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP). GAAP is a set of accounting and financial reporting standards administered by the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB). More information about FASB can be found at www.FASB.org. In this course we will analyze each of the three basic financial statements in detail, as well as other statements and key indicators of the financial well-being of the company. The first section is an overview of the financial statements, followed by detailed explanations of the Balance Sheet, Income Statement, Statement of Cash Flows, and Statement of Retained Earnings. Source: Marianne Peeters