Understanding FSA Concepts and Calculations

In this blog, I illustrate how our “Concept Check” feature lets you reinforce your understanding of the concepts specific to the topic you are studying. 

By reading other parts of this site or watching the videos, you have seen how to take information from the statements and construct ratios.  This is the “practice” part.  But you may not be as familiar with some of the calculated values (blue background) or exactly how they are calculated.   This is where the “Concept Check” comes in.  For the illustration, I will use the part of profitability analysis that calculates ROA and ROE.

Start by clicking the “Concept Check” icon:

Once you do, you will see:

There are three calculated concepts in this topic:

Net Income Attributable to Shareholders

Return on Assets

Return on Equity

You can learn how each concept is calculated by simply dragging and dropping the terms themselves into the blank area on the right, add arithmetic operators, and create a formula.  If you click on the Explanation tab, you will see the definition of each term.

Let’s do an easy one: Net Income Attributable to Shareholders

This is simply Net Income minus Net Income Attributable to NCI.  So simply drag and drop the two terms and type in a minus sign in between:

By repeating this, you will become very familiar with both the explanation and the formula underlying a concept. 

If you just want to explore concepts, in any order and without worrying about where they are used, select the branch “Learn Calculated Concepts”

If you click on a concept, it will give you a definition, but will also tell you where it is used.  In the picture, the Accrual Ratio (Balance Sheet) is used in a sub-branch of “Analyze Earnings Quality” and you can see its definition.

If you select “Learn Calculation,” you will see:

You can again drag and drop the terms to create a formula and see if you know how the specific concept is calculated: