Financial Statement Analysis

Course goals

Learning objectives
At the end of the course, the student is able to:

• understand fundamental accounting concepts used to construct financial statements, learn rules of book-keeping
• understand the close link between a company’s strategy and accounting outcomes
• apply a critical thinking approach to the analysis of financial statement information, keeping in mind how alternative accounting methods affect earnings and key financial ratios and consequently, understand the concept of earnings management
• understand the role of sustainability reporting in evaluating a company
• conduct an extensive financial statement analysis exercise for a real company in a team

Content

This course aims to provide students with an understanding of how to interpret and analyse financial statements for the purpose of business analysis, the pre-requisite for valuation. The course provides a framework that is needed to analyse a company's profitability, liquidity, and solvency, among other things. It also teaches how to evaluate a company's accounting choices and their impact on reported numbers, and how to make adjustments to these reported numbers for a better representation of the underlying economic reality, especially for forecasting and valuation purposes. Furthermore, the course allows for applying this knowledge to analyse real-life companies: how to apply and interpret key financial ratios and cash flow analysis, given the company’s strategic position in the industry.

In case online access is required for this course and you are not in the position to buy the access code, you are advised to contact the course coordinator for an alternative solution. Please note that access codes are not re-usable meaning that codes from second hand books do not work, as well as access codes from books with a different ISBN. Separate or spare codes are usually not available.