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.

"Think of the federal government as a gigantic insurance company (with a side line business in national defense and homeland security) which only does its accounting on a cash basis-only counting premiums and payouts as they go in and out the door. An insurance company with cash accounting is not an insurance company at all. It is an accident waiting to happen." Peter R. Fisher, former Bush Administration Undersecretary of the Treasury "Our objective in preparing the fiscal year 2005 Financial Report of the U.S. Government is to give Congress and the American people a timely and useful report on the cost of the Federal Government's operations." John W. Snow, former Bush Administration Secretary of the Treasury "Scoring the budget on an accrual basis-the private sector norm and, I believe, a sensible direction for federal budget accounting-would better underscore the tradeoffs we face. Under accrual accounting, benefits would be counted as they are earned by workers rather than when they are paid out by the government." Alan Greenspan, former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board "The significance of these accrual-based reports is that they show the implications of current budgetary decisions over a longer time horizon…. This information is therefore an important element of the debate about the real effects of governmental commitments." Paul H. O'Neill, former Bush Administration Secretary of the Treasury "[A] practical management tool for policy-makers and a source of useful information for the public about the assets, liabilities, and operations of the government." Lawrence H. Summers, former Clinton Administration Secretary of the Treasury "We believe that the publication of this financial report is an important step in providing the American public with useful information about their government's assets, liabilities and operations." Robert E. Rubin, former Clinton Administration Secretary of the Treasury In December 2005, the White House published its Financial Report of the United States Government-only 2000 copies were printed despite the purpose of the report being to explain the country's financial wellbeing to Congress and the American people. Now, for the first time, that report is widely published so the American people can see what's really going on with the nation's finances.