Topic 8 Financial Statements

@hamdi90 – as you failed anyway the marker may have tried to give you some encouragement. But you are playing Russian Roulette if you think they won’t notice this time. As Ahmed has pointed out the Info Pack makes it very clear so if you are failed for knowingly submitting old FS then you will only have yourself to blame!

you should mention this “Appendix 1”, Appendix 2 ……

You can add multiple files as appendices.

@Nick123 – no probs 🙂

@akonda – I thought I answered this above on 25th October? As I have suggested many times elsewhere, students should NOT get locked into trying to look at things year by year – it is the trends in the data that are important (the management do not start out on the first day of each financial year and come up with a new strategy that ends on the last day of the financial year).

You should be looking at Easyjet’s various strategies (often formulated from the SWOT factors) and how they and the PESTLE impacted and influenced the financial performance and comparing this with Ryanair over (approximately in your case) the same period.

@awais – putting something in brackets at the end of the paragraph is not referencing- referencing is about identifying exactly what is being referenced in the text itself. I think you can assume with figures that the marker has the knowledge to look at the income statement or Balance sheet for actual figures so you don’t need page numbers but if you want to, it is not wrong to put them in. Usually if you have referenced your graphs (which you are expected to do) you do not need to repeat the reference in the text for the same figures or the differences between them (note: citing and talking about what is obvious from the graph just wastes words – let the graphs speak for themselves and you use your words to explain).

Remember it is WHY the GP has increased by 7% that the marker will be interested in (and they don’t want it explained in terms of the cost of sales decreased as that tends to be a statement of the obvious)

@awais21 – yes that is the sort of thing. As these figures will not be apparent from the graph they will need to be referenced e.g. “company A’s gp moved up due to healthy sales revenue increase of 147% which was due to 157% increase in domestic dispatches and 15% increase in exports [insert reference here]. If you can, try to expand on these statements for example ‘domestic sales rose because… maybe costs of producing say, cars has fallen

– as they are assembled locally enabling some of this saving to be passed on to consumers
– economies of scale
– better technologies employed compared with competitors (so greater market share)

You have to try to get behind the figures as much as possible in your analysis by trying to answer the question “Why was this?” and if poss relating it back to management strategies (which they will have based on SWOT factors) and environmental (PESTLE) factors (stronger currency, increases in disposable income, favourable tax policies, introduction of new technologies etc). So why were domestic sales and exports up?

ok i saw the last line :D, i am doing rap on cement companis ,after some research on internet the local sales were up because highways and overhead bridges are being constructed by govt which causd many local cement comps to savor huge sales and some neighboring countries are going under massive infrastructure development caused the exports to sniff good highs 😀

in my brackets when referencing, the year end is either 2011, 2012 or 2013 but the annual reports are prepared the year after year end, if I am referring to the 2011 annual report do I reference as ( annual report company x, 2011) or (annual report company x, 2012) and also in my reference section lets say I have quoted the CEO more than once on the same page do I list these separately or do I list them as one reference???

@denmaster referencing has been covered endlessly on the Forum Harvard Referencing so read through it or use the Forum search facility to look up all referencing queries using a few key words.

@Amarain

1. Source under graph is fine. You do not need to repeat figures that are showing in the graphs as it wastes words and the reader can see it for themselves. For more details on referencing please see the Harvard Referencing forum

2. Yes appendices need to show where the Info originated from.

3. You do not have to upload the company FSs if you have the detailed extracts again please see the Forum on Appendix Queries for the finer details

@avian will – I am not sure if you can get this from the relevant stock exchange or specialist journals (it may require a subscription) – they should have records of actual average daily prices going back a number of years on listed companies. Some companies do show the average share price at year end in their FS (in may be in the table summary of highlights in the full FS or in the special online quartlerly press release highlights) or tucked away in the section dealing with directors remuneration/ compensation. Otherwise you will just have to review the general trend in profits and share price.

PS You may be able to use the 3 year graph that the London stock exchange produces for prices if using a UK listed company but it will be 3 years to current date (and is plotted right to left on the y axis)

Oh and I promise I’m not being lazy…I did try to look for the answers to the above myself but have not been able to (textbook or google)… hence am asking in case you and someone here readily knows.

@avian will –

1. You are going over the top with the minutiae – it really doesn’t matter if it is so insignificant!!!

2. Depends – is there a note in the accounts for finance costs as the total of that is what I would take as the costs and no I wouldn’t net it off as you might inadvertently double count a part of income

3. If you use company calculated ratios for this you must acknowledge this fact – explanations of performance are more important though as you are aware