For courses in Financial Accounting, Financial Reporting, Financial Statement Analysis, Introduction to Business, or MBA finance courses. Understanding the Corporate Annual Report: Nuts, Bolts, and A Few Loose Screws provides a clearly written, step-by-step guide to understanding corporate annual reports. Authors Fraser and Ormiston instruct readers on how to ignore the PR letters from the corporate management team, engaging graphics, and other "garnishes" that typically accompany current annual reports in order to focus on what really counts--a company's performance and financial health! Throughout the text, the authors examine management's attempts to manipulate earnings and other performance measures, and they explain what the numbers in the report really mean.

An annual report is a powerful and revealing document about a company's financial standing, and can offer the savvy reader substantial insight about where the company may be headed in the future. But to the untrained eye, it may seem like walls of accounting technicalities provided to fill up space between the glossy photos and the upbeat "Message from the CEO."Annual Reports 101 gets past the PR machine to show the meaning behind the math. This straightforward guide reveals how to read the primary financial documents in the report, and then extract more information--from the numbers themselves and from the often fluffy text--than some companies want the public to know. The book shows how to watch out for "red flags," decipher footnotes and see past common practices that, while legal, may not give the most accurate picture. Readers of annual reports include potential investors and business partners, financial advisers, company employees, lenders and many others whose stake in the success of a public company is crucial to their own.

Publishing the Nonprofit Annual Report offers your nonprofit organization hands-on guidance to help you create an annual report that goes beyond fulfilling your financial reporting responsibilities and instead becomes a valuable communications, marketing, and image-building tool. Written by Caroline Taylor--a consultant who has more than twenty years of experience producing award-winning annual reports--this essential guide takes you through the report-writing cycle from start to finish. Step by step, she shows you how to create a plan, fit the report process into the overall schedule, assign tasks, develop the executive message, work with designers to integrate visual elements, and get the report printed on time and within budget.

Over the years, the titles in this popular series have helped ordinary consumers understand principles of prudent money management as a key to personal financial security. Written by experienced financial and investment specialists, Barron’s Business Keys use non-technical language that takes the mystery out of business practices. They offer up-to-date advice on saving, investing, seeking mortgages and other loans, protecting one’s assets, coping with taxes, and managing many other money-related issues. This updated edition advises investors on how to cut through the public relations jargon, focus on the annual report’s important facts and figures, and use that information to assess a company’s financial health.

Hidden somewhere among all the numbers in a financial report is vitally important information about where a company has been and where it is going. This Fourth Edition is designed to help anyone who works with financial reports—but has neither the time nor the need for an in-depth knowledge of accounting—cut through the maze of accounting information to find out what those numbers really mean. In this edition an entirely new and carefully designed exhibit is used to visually illustrate the connecting links among the three key statements in a financial report (the balance sheet, the income statement and the cash flow statement). This center-piece exhibit—used throughout the text—includes a two-year comparative balance sheet to explain the cash flow statement much more effectively. Also features a new chapter on the making and changing of financial reporting rules and updated information on new legislation.