Brain Dump

Financial Statements

Tags
finance

Summary of Financial Accounting.

See characteristics of a [see page 10, financial statement], to summarise financial information should be:

  • Relevant
    • Predictive value, can be used to form expectations about the future
    • Confirmatory value, can confirm or correct prior expectations
    • Materially complete. Information is material if omitting (or mistating) it could change the decisions made by users.
  • Faithfully Representative
    • Complete, all relevent information is provided
    • Neutral, information cannot favor one interested party over another
    • Free from error

It would also be nice if the account is:

  • Comparable, can easily be compared alongside other reports
  • Verifiable, other people measuring it come to same conclusion
  • Timeliness, information should be available before it can influence decisions (eg. in 2 weeks we're gonna file for bankruptcy... you find out 3 weeks later :P)
  • Understandable, information isn't barfed onto you.

Variants

There are 3 kinds of [see page 23, financial statements]:

Links to this note