Table of Content

Chapter 1: Financial Statements: An Overview
Chapter 2: The Balance Sheet
Chapter 3: Income Statement and Statement of Stockholders' Equity
Chapter 4: Statement of Cash Flows
Chapter 5: The Analysis of Financial Statements
 

Salient Features

A supplementary text for a variety of Business courses, including Financial Statement Analysis, Investments, Personal Finance, and Financial Planning and Analysis.

Fraser and Ormiston take students behind the financial reports to assess the real financial condition and performance of U.S. companies.

Understanding Financial Statements, retains its reputation for readability, concise coverage, and accessibility, and gives students the conceptual background and analytical tools necessary to understand and interpret business financial statements. Its ultimate goal is to improve students' ability to translate financial statement numbers into a meaningful map for business decisions and enable each student to approach financial statements with enhanced confidence.

Valuable Resources: This text contains everything a student needs to enhance their understanding of key topics including:

Self-tests at the end of chapters with solutions provided
Chapter-end study questions and problems
Glossary of key terms available in the index.
Footnotes: Throughout the text footnotes provide resources that may be used by instructors to form the basis of a reading list for students

Examples, Study Questions, and Problems: All chapters include coursework that is relevant to today's student. This material illustrates accounting concepts and the current accounting environment.
Chapter 1 includes discussions on the impact of Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 in relation to the auditor's role, the future accounting rules and financial reporting standards, as the Financial Accounting Standards Board and International Accounting Standards Board work toward a convergence of accounting rules.
Chapter 2 explains inventory methods and include the depreciation example, previously used in Chapter 1, where it blends with the discussion of fixed assets.
Chapter 3 reflects the recent changes in accounting standards.
Chapter 5 contains a checklist for earnings quality and examples for each item on the checklist are included.
Problems in writing skills, Internet, research and Intel: The problems in this text are based on the 2007 annual report. The Intel problems specifically, offer the student the opportunity to analyze a real, high-tech company throughout the text.
Comprehensive Analysis Problem: At the end of each chapter, problems based on the Eastman Kodak 2007 Form 10-K and Annual Report illustrate how to complete a financial statement analysis using the template available online www.prenhall.com/fraser.
Cases: Up-to-date cases based on real-world companies appear throughout this text.