FINAN 5510 - Interpreting Financial Statements

This course focuses on reading, interpreting, and analyzing financial statements, which are critical steps in making business decisions such as valuing a business or assessing its credit worthiness. Enhancing your ability to manipulate and understand the information contained in the financial reports and statements will allow you to draw more informed inferences about a firm’s financial condition and future performance. During the course, we will examine the effect of different accounting policy and estimate choices on reported income, assets, liabilities, stockholders’ equity, cash flows and other relevant line items reported in the financial statements. We will examine the impact of these choices on measures of financial performance including standard financial ratios. Much of our time will be focused on manipulating financial data contained in the footnotes to the financial statements. This class is user-oriented as opposed to preparer-oriented.