Understanding Financial Statements

This is a book resource with multiple pages. Navigate between the pages using the buttons.

The income statement, balance sheet, and statement of owner's equity are financial tools that help business owners and managers make smart and informed decisions about their companies' futures.

We hope that, so far, we've made at least one thing clear: If you're in business, you need to understand financial statements. For one thing, the law no longer allows high-ranking executives to plead ignorance or fall back on delegation of authority when it comes to taking responsibility for a firm's financial reporting. In a business environment tainted by episodes of fraudulent financial reporting and other corporate misdeeds, top managers are now being held accountable (so to speak) for the financial statements issued by the people who report to them. For another thing, top managers need to know if the company is hitting on all cylinders or sputtering down the road to bankruptcy. To put it another way (and to switch metaphors): if he didn't understand the financial statements issued by the company's accountants, an executive would be like an airplane pilot who doesn't know how to read the instrument in the cockpit - he might be able keep the plane in the air for a while, but he wouldn't recognize any signs of impending trouble until it was too late.

This text was adapted by Saylor University under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License without attribution as requested by the work's original creator or licensor.

Callback before_footer in local_aigrade component should be migrated to new hook callback for core\hook\output\before_footer_html_generation

line 7225 of /lib/moodlelib.php: call to debugging()
line 7292 of /lib/moodlelib.php: call to {closure}()
line 71 of /lib/classes/hook/output/before_footer_html_generation.php: call to get_plugins_with_function()
line 987 of /lib/classes/output/core_renderer.php: call to core\hook\output\before_footer_html_generation->process_legacy_callbacks()
line 97 of /mod/book/tool/print/index.php: call to core\output\core_renderer->footer()