- Hi, I'm Jim Stice, I'm a Professor
of Accounting at Brigham Young University.
This is my brother Kay.
- I'm also a Professor of Accounting
at Brigham Young University.
We are an accounting family.
- Absolutely, we love numbers.
We love financial statements, and we love using financial
reports to gain insight into how companies work.
- [Kay] This course introduces you to methods
of financial statement analysis that allow you
to use a company's financial reports
to identify the company's strengths and weaknesses.
- [Jim] You can use a company's financial reports
to identify how they've preformed in the past,
areas for improvement in the future
as well as to identify areas of risk in the now.
- Before taking this course, you might consider
taking our Accounting Foundations course.
That course introduces you to the major areas of accounting.
- But with that said, we have designed
this Corporate Financial Statement Analysis course
to be self-contained, and we carefully explain
any accounting terminology that we use.
- In short, this is an introductory course
with no prior accounting knowledge necessary.
Now when it comes to financial statement
analysis, I like to borrow a quote from Winston Churchill.
He said the following.
"The further backward you can look,
"the further forward you can see."
- We analyze financial statements
to tell us if a company has done well
or poorly in the past and help us see
how the company might do in the future.
- With financial statement analysis,
you can begin to spot trends in the financial statement
data that provide clues as to what the future might hold.
- You can start to see how past decisions
have affected the financial statements
and how decisions made now might affect
the statements of the future.
- [Kay] Financial statement analysis
is the process of using the relationships among
a company's financial statement numbers
to gain insights into that company's operations.
Past, present, and future.
- So, let's go.