It’s time to get a bit more practical, and teach your classmates about the knowledge you gain throughout the process!
You will form groups of 4-5 students and work on the financial statements of real companies, preparing a report on the financial statements and also presenting these to your classmates! How cool is that?! 🙂
Here are what you need to include in your report, and in your presentation:
- A very brief introduction to the company and what it does;
- Presenting the three main statements of the business (i.e. balance sheet, income statement and cash flow statement) for at least the past 3 accounting period;
- Analysing the major items on the statements and describing any interesting items we might have not covered in class and their meaning;
- Comparing the changes in the major items on the statements of the business from year to year, and projecting patterns if possible, analysing these changes;
- Calculating some relevant financial and accounting ratios for the company and interpreting them.
Next steps and deadlines:
You need to choose your group of 4-5 students yourselves in the People section of the mycourses page.
The deadline for determining your group members will be will be announced separately. If any of you haven’t been assigned to a group, I reserve the right to randomly assign you to a group within a few days, or add you to a group of my choice.
When your groups are finalised, you’ll need to choose a company with your group to analyse. Of course you’d need to be very careful here. The simpler the company’s business, the better. Don’t go for large conglomerates with many businesses and divisions. It doesn’t have to be a large multi-national company at all! It doesn’t need to be a well-known company either.
You’d need to make sure you have access to the annual statements of this company for the several years before. Also it is probably best to choose a trading, or a manufacturing company, rather than one in the services industries, as their statements will be more similar to the ones we have covered during the course. You CANNOT choose a company in the finance or utilities sector. When choosing your company, make sure you browse their financial statements to avoid going for overly complicated options. The financial statements need to have been prepared in ENGLISH. You’ll probably need to use excel to calculate the ratios and observe patterns, and present them in understandable formats.
Delivery:
Each group will prepare a report of 3,000 to 4,000 words, plus a presentation to be delivered in class. You will, basically, teach what you’ve learned about the company and it’s financial statements to the whole class, and the strength of your delivery will be important as well.
The deadline for submitting the report as well as the presentation files is stated below.
On the last 3 sessions of the term, each group will present their work separately, educating the rest of us about the case they’ve covered. Please have in mind that this is an important part of the course’s material and everyone’s presence is compulsory. Every group will have the same deadline for submitting the report and the presentation files (just one submission per group is required of course). I will announce the exact time slots for the presentations later.
Each group will have 15 minutes to present, plus 3-4 minutes for Q&As.
I will of course further elaborate on the points above in class.