Library: Finance: Company Ratios

Ratio Analysis

"Financial ratios illustrate relationships between different aspects of a business's operations. They involve the comparison of elements from a balance sheet or income statement, and are crafted with particular points of focus in mind. Financial ratios can provide business owners and managers with a valuable tool to measure their progress against predetermined internal goals, a certain competitor, or the overall industry. In addition, tracking various ratios over time is a powerful way to identify trends as they develop. Ratios are also used by bankers, investors, and business analysts to assess various attributes of a company's financial strength or operating results."

- Encyclopedia of Small Business
Ed. Laurie Collier Hillstrom and Kevin Hillstrom. Vol. 1. 2nd ed. Detroit: Gale, 2002. p502-505.

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

At the opening screen, type the name of your company in the company name box.
When a list of choices comes up, select your company.
From the Snapshot column on the left, select: Financial Overview

4. From the Jump to choices, select the Ratio Analysis link.

In order to see up to three years of ratios:
After selecting Ratio Analysis, scroll down a few screens.

Gale Business: Insights This link opens in a new window
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A unique database that brings together a wide variety of resources that cover companies and industries.
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.

From the opening screen, type: Nike
Once you select your company, For instance, Nike. Slide down the first page (Company Profile) until you find the Financials. The box containing Ratios will be the last box on the right.