5 Types of Financial Statements The Completed Set and Beginner Guide

The balance sheet is sometimes called the statement of financial position since it shows the values of the entity’s net worth. You can find an entity’s net worth by removing liabilities from total assets. Financial statements give clarity about the fundamentals of the organization.

If an “other” item has a high dollar amount, find out what it is and if it’s likely to recur. If a company has consistent declining revenues over the years, it’s not a good investment. Income statement accounts are known as temporary accounts because the account balances adjust to zero at the end of each month and year. Usually, the purpose of horizontal analysis is to detect growth trends across different time periods.

What are financial statements?

Non-operating items are all the other revenues and expenses that are not part of the business’s main operations. These include interest expenses, interest income, proceeds from sale of extraordinary items, lawsuit expenses, and taxes. The assets of a company should always equal the combination of its liabilities and shareholders’ equity. Getting into the habit of reviewing financial statements and reports is essential and QuickBooks simplifies and streamlines this process to give you more time to focus on running your business. Your financial statements help you assess your business’s financial health, and there are a few red flags that can indicate trouble. Learning to spot these red flags early on can help you make smarter financial decisions for your business.

Also, purchases of fixed assets such as property, plant, and equipment (PPE) are included in this section. In short, changes in equipment, assets, or investments relate to cash from investing. Instead, it contains three sections that report cash flow for the various activities for which a company uses its cash.

The “charge” for using these assets during the period is a fraction of the original cost of the assets. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) are the set of rules by which United States companies must prepare their financial statements. It is the guidelines that explain how to record transactions, when to recognize revenue, and when expenses must be recognized. International companies may use a similar but different set of rules called International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS).

• In the income statement, income is sometimes called sales revenues or Revenues.
• Finally, financial statements can be difficult to interpret without a basic understanding of accounting principles.
• All items of income and expense recognised in a period must be included in profit or loss unless a Standard or an Interpretation requires otherwise.
• All such information is provided solely for convenience purposes only and all users thereof should be guided accordingly.
• The notes typically describe each item on the balance sheet, income statement and cash flow statement in further detail.

In the accounting equation, assets are calculated by the accumulation of equity and liabilities. This indicates how much cash the company has generated or used from investing activities. This can include things like buying property, plant, & equipment or investing in securities. Selling, general, and administrative (SG&A) expenses, in other words, all non-production costs, are usually lumped together with operating expenses. Some companies also choose to put this as a separate line item from operating expenses.

Second, financial statements only include information that can be quantified in monetary terms. This means the numbers do not reflect vital information like customer satisfaction or employee morale. This indicates the amount of money the company has generated or used from its financing activities. Operating profit is a company’s income after deducting all operating expenses from the gross profit. These are compiled using Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP). GAAP is a set of guidelines and standards U.S.-based companies must follow when preparing their financial statements.

Cash Flow Statements

Securities and Exchange Commission have mandated XBRL for the submission of financial information. The growth of the Web has seen more and more financial statements created in an electronic form which is exchangeable over the Web. These types of electronic financial statements have their drawbacks in that it still takes a human to read the information in order to reuse the information contained in a financial statement. In consolidated financial statements, all subsidiaries are listed as well as the amount of ownership (controlling interest) that the parent company has in the subsidiaries.

In this example, Apple’s total assets of $323.8 billion is segregated towards the top of the report. This asset section is broken into current assets and non-current assets, and each of these categories is broken into more specific accounts. A brief review of Apple’s assets shows that their cash on hand decreased, yet their non-current assets increased. Shareholder equity is the money attributable to the owners of a business or its shareholders. It is also known as net assets since it is equivalent to the total assets of a company minus its liabilities or the debt it owes to non-shareholders. Although financial statements provide a wealth of information on a company, they do have limitations.

What is the impact of Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) on financial statements?

A statement of change inequity is one financial statement that shows the shareholder contribution and movement in equity. If the user of financial statements wants to know the entity’s financial position, then the balance sheet is the statement the user should be looking for. Expenses are operational costs that occur in the entity for a specific accounting period. They rank from operating expenses like salary expenses, utilities, depreciation, transportation, and training expenses to tax expenses and interest expenses. The revenues present in the income statements are the revenues generated from both cash sales and credit sales. In the revenues section, you could know how much the entity makes net sales for their covering period.

Direct vs indirect cash flow

If a company takes out a five-year, $4,000 loan from a bank, its assets (specifically, the cash account) will increase by $4,000. Its liabilities (specifically, the long-term debt account) will also increase by $4,000, balancing the two sides of the equation. If the company takes $8,000 from investors, its assets will increase by that amount, as will its shareholder equity.

Elements of Financial Statements:

Noting the year-over-year change informs users of the financial statements of a company’s health. An often less utilized financial statement, a statement of comprehensive income summarizes standard net income while also incorporating changes in other comprehensive income (OCI). Other comprehensive income includes all unrealized gains and losses that are not reported on the income statement. This financial statement shows a company’s total change in income, even gains and losses that have yet to be recorded in accordance to accounting rules.

Cash flow statement

Fortunately, studying up on the most frequently used financial statements can lift the fog off this proverbial sea, making it much more straightforward to navigate financial analysis. These five financial statements could produce five types of financial statements for the entity’s stakeholders using. Expenses are records as operational costs in the income statement in the period they have occurred. An example of revenues is sales revenues from selling goods or rendering services, interest incomes from bank deposits, and a dividend received from equity investments. Liabilities can be calculated by eliminating the total equities from total assets or accumulating total current liabilities and total long-term liabilities. In other words, fixed assets are the resources based on nature converted into cash or cash equivalent in more than one year accounting period.

At Finance Strategists, we partner with financial experts to ensure the accuracy of our financial content. IAS 1 was reissued in September 2007 and applies to annual periods beginning what is a 12 month rolling forecast on or after 1 January 2009. Balance sheets should also be compared with those of other businesses in the same industry since different industries have unique approaches to financing.