Library: Corporate Finance: Financial statements

Financial statements in the Databases.......

Business: Insights Gale
Company Dossier

Gale Business: Insights This link opens in a new window A unique database that brings together a wide variety of resources that cover companies and industries.
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This innovative resource includes company profiles (with corporate parent/sibling relationships), industry rankings, products and brands, investment reports, industry statistics, financial ratios, case studies, and corporate chronologies and history. Coverage is from 1980-present.

1. Type Your Company in the initial screen.

2. From the Results screen, scroll down to see all the Financials.

Nexis Uni This link opens in a new window Nexis Uni™ features more than 15,000 news, business and legal sources from LexisNexis—including U.S. Supreme Court decisions dating back to 1790—with an intuitive interface that offers quick discovery across all content types, personalization features such as Alerts and saved searches and a collaborative workspace with shared folders and annotated documents.

Access Company Dossier

1. From the Nexis/Uni home page, slide to the top of the page.
2. Click on the down arrow by Menu. Select: Company Dossier

In the Company Name box, type: your company
Select your company from the Results List
From the left navigation area, select: Financial Overview
You will find: Assets, Liabilities, Cash Flow, Income Statement, Balance sheets, and Ratio Analyses, all for a three year time period.

Historical Quarterly Financial Statements

ABI/INFORM Collection This link opens in a new window
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Most scholarly and comprehensive way to explore and understand business research topics. Searches three ABI-INFORM databases: Dateline, Global, and Trade and Industry. Covers business and economic conditions, corporate strategies, management techniques, as well as competitive and product information. Its international coverage gives researchers a complete picture of companies and business trends around the world. Search nearly 8,000 publications worldwide, almost 80% available in full text. The database contains complete runs of key business and management journals, providing a unique historical perspective from 1923-present. Full text coverage of the Wall Street Journal is also included from 1984-present.

1. Start in the Advanced Search screen
2. In the first search box, type the company name and use the drop down box to change the field to: Company/organization - ORG
3. In the second search box, type: financial performance and use the drop down box to change the field to: Subject heading (all) - SU
4. Scroll down below the search box. From the Source type box, select: Wire Feeds.
5. Search
6. Shows results back to 1997.

SEC
1. Find the 8K document for your company.
2. Before 2004, look for Item 12.
3. In late 2004 and beyond, look for Item 2.02
4. Use Control/F on your keyboard to locate the item numbers.

in Annual Reports......

Besides giving comparative financial statements for the current and past years, some give divisional reports of past activities and future plans. Many companies will feature links to the digitized version of their annual reports from their company Internet site. Look for the link to Investor Relations.

in Data sets.......

Damodaran Online
An MBA professor from NYU has put together a web page that provides information on how to collect data from a variety of sources. It also allows you to look at and download a number of data sets that you might find useful in corporate finance and valuation. If you have trouble viewing the data in your browser, you can download the data in excel format.

In SEC filings......

Corporate financial reports and other disclosure documents are excellent sources for current financial statistics and for other detailed information about the operations of publicly traded companies. These documents include not only annual reports to stockholders but also the various reports that U.S. companies are required to file with the Securities and Exchange Commission: an Annual Report to SEC (called the 10-K); Quarterly Financial Report (10-Q); Report of Unscheduled Material Events or Corporate Changes (8-K); 10-C, which is similar to 8-K for OTC (Over The Counter) companies;

You can obtain SEC Filings from the following sources:

Securities and Exchange Commission This is the official site of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's database named, EDGAR. (Electronic, Data, Gathering, Analysis and Retrieval System). All companies that are publicly traded in the U.S. are required to file registration statements, periodic reports, and other forms electronically through EDGAR.

Nexis Uni This link opens in a new window Nexis Uni™ features more than 15,000 news, business and legal sources from LexisNexis—including U.S. Supreme Court decisions dating back to 1790—with an intuitive interface that offers quick discovery across all content types, personalization features such as Alerts and saved searches and a collaborative workspace with shared folders and annotated documents.

1. From the Guided Search area, [What are you interested in?]. highlight Company Info.
2. In the next box, [Search in all Company Information for:], type your company. For example, Home Depot.
3. In the next box, [..and show me], use the down arrow and highlight: SEC filings.

4. In the Results page, use the Timeline filter in the left column to limit the time frame.

Reading financial statements

A Journalist's Guide to Financial Statements

SEC's beginner's guide to financial statements