An important pre-requisite for financial statement analysis is an understanding of the statements themselves, including understanding what information is presented where and how some basic variables reported by a company have changed over time.
The FTS FSA Module has embedded in it a Financial Statement Viewer that lets you do this and also plot variables. You access the viewer from the Options menu:
Once you select it, the viewer will open in a new window:
You select the company, filing, and statement as before. In the statement display at the bottom left, the first column has a checkbox. This selects what is plotted on the left. For our example, we have checked the six items that make up the current assets of 1-800-Flowers.Com (FLWS). You can see that compared to July 03, 2011, all items have increased except the last two: Prepaid and Other and the Current Assets of Discontinued Operations. Comparison across time, as in the chart, is sometime called “horizontal analysis” or “trend analysis.”
You can select a 2-dimensional or a 3-dimensional chart; the 3D chart can be rotated, e.g.
The Pie Chart button above the chart gives an alternate view of the same data:
The pie chart shows you how the composition of current assets has changed. The green slice, Inventories, make up a smaller proportion while receivables are a larger proportion.
An important feature built into the viewer is the ability to conduct Common Size Analysis, and we describe it in a separate topic on this site.
