Evaluating Corporate Financial Performance

This textbook offers a step-by-step guide through comprehensive financial statement analysis with real-life case studies for students of financial accounting, financial reporting, and financial statement analysis. Structured into five comprehensive sections, it begins by explaining the content of accounting reports themselves and the three primary financial statements (income statement, balance sheet and cash flow statement). It deciphers the notes to financial statements and demonstrates some classical tools such as ratio analysis and multivariable credit risk models that are useful in a retrospective financial statement analysis. It includes simple step-by-step procedures of a prospective (i.e. future-oriented) financial statement simulation and closes with a comprehensive real-life case study that demonstrates a practical application of the analytical tools discussed earlier in the text. Additionally, the textbook includes online appendices consisting of additional comprehensivereal-life case studies (of varying degrees of complexity and dealing with different aspects of a practical financial statement analysis), a set of MS Excel files that contain all major calculations included in tables and charts that appear in the core textbook, and a set of webinars in which the most fundamental parts of the core textbook are discussed in the form of the recorded lectures.

“Jacek’s book offers a user-friendly step-by-step guide through a corporate financial statement analysis. It is a journey starting from fundamental concepts of financial reporting, and then traveling through numerous analytical tools, which are discussed with both a retrospective as well as future-oriented focus. The real-life examples greatly demonstrate not only how financial reports are useful in evaluating business performance, but also (or before all) in an assessment of corporate business risks. The auxiliary materials are innovative and highly valuable too, since they make a ‘digestion’ of the discussed topics much easier, especially for non-advanced readers.”—Artur Osuchowski, former consultant at KPMG and E&Y, former Deputy President of Ciech S.A. and ongoing member of several supervisory boards of companies listed on Warsaw Stock Exchange 

“I strongly recommend this textbook to any student or practitioner who intends to develophis or her skills in interpreting accounting numbers reported on corporate financial reports. All analytical concepts, discussed in this book, are demonstrated with the use of real-life case studies based on data extracted from financial statements of multiple corporations. For example, in chapter five, several analytical tools are presented to evaluate a company with a high bankruptcy risk. The analysis in all chapters ensures a ‘down-to-earth’ focus, as well as a purely practical orientation of Jacek’s work.”

—Ahmad H. Jumah, Associate Professor of Accounting, University of Illinois Springfield 

“Jacek’s book goes beyond simply helping readers understand what financial statements contain. His book innovatively helps readers use those statements to gather true insight into a company’s performance and operations. Through one timely example after another, readers come away with a far deeper sense of the power of effective and transparent financial reporting.”

—Eugene Soltes, McLean Family Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School 

“This book is extraordinary because of innovative features such as online appendix, Excel files, and webinar-form lectures. It includes interesting real-life cases which will attract readers’ attention. This book is quite different from existing accounting books and will be an outstanding tool for financial statement analysis.”

—Ingoo Han, Professor of Accounting, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology 

“This is a wonderful book, the additional materials create a kind of augmented reality for learning finance, and its practical approach makes it an essential reference for finance courses based on the case method or challenge-based learning.”

—Felipe A. Pérez Sosa, EGADE Business School, Tecnológico de Monterrey 

“Jacek’s writing on accounting is sharp and illuminating. His latest is no exception anda must read for those trying to understand the art of financial reporting.”

—Jamie Powell, FT Alphaville

Jacek Welc is an Assistant Professor at Wroclaw University of Economics, Poland and a Professor of Corporate Finance at SRH Berlin University of Applied Sciences, Germany. From 2003 to 2007 he was an independent consultant in the areas of corporate valuation, management accounting, and financial accounting. Having also been Head of the Corporate Finance Department at Dexus Partners, Jacek now co-owns a consultancy specialising in corporate financial services called WNP Ekspert. He has written and published a number of articles, as well as a two books: Applied Regression Analysis for Business: Tools, Traps and Applications (Springer, 2017) and Reading Between the Lines of Corporate Financial Reports: In Search of Financial Misstatements (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).