Ratios Analysis In Financial Analysis

Ratio analysis are useful tools when judging the performance of a company by weighing and evaluating the operating performance (Block-Hirt). There are 13 significant ratios that can separate by four main categories,

Ratios are highly important profit tools in financial analysis that help financial analysts implement plans that improve profitability, liquidity, financial structure, reordering, leverage, and interest coverage. Although ratios report mostly on past performances, they can be predictive too, and provide lead indications of potential problem areas. Financial ratios are important because they help investors make decisions to buy hold or sell securities.

Ratio analysis is a very powerful method of analyzing the status of a company by manipulating the audited financial statements. They are a yardstick of doing a performance evaluation of the firm’s financial condition. A deeper understanding of the ratios by an investor offers them more knowledge on the working of the firm and the best investment they can undertake. The financial ratio gives a relationship of two or more accounting variables through arithmetical expressions (Beck, 2009). They offer a standard for comparison of firms’ growth and performance as well as with competitors, more so, they offer the firm a clean bill of health.

Ratios are important in any type of business, because ratios are sued all the way across the board. many financial ratios are used for the purpose of credit analysis, to see where a company stands financially. The three types of ratios are liquidity, solvency, and profitability. Within these main ratio types there are also 8 other basic types of ratios.

The operating profit margin helps investors understand quality of the company in terms of how much a company makes on each dollar of sale. The formula to calculate the operating profit margin is

What are ratios and what are they used for? Ratios are mathematical tools that are used in the financial part of any business. Some ratios can consist of fractions or decimals, and some percentages. For large businesses and organizations, they use efficiency, liquidity, profitability, and solvency ratios.

Ratios divide different financial statements into one another, they determine trends and changes in financial statement quantities and are used to standardize balance sheet and income statement numbers. (Melicher, R. W., & Norton, E. A. (2013).

Ratio analysis are useful tools when judging the performance of a company by weighing and evaluating the operating performance (Block-Hirt). There are 13 significant ratios that can separate by four main categories,

Aerts and Walton (2013) expressed ratio analysis as connection between two elements of financial statements. According to them, ratios analysis allows to compare the incomparable elements in different companies. In other words, we may say that comparing profit on its own between two companies would not give a reliable conclusion on organisations’ profitability. If would simply ignore profit relationship with other financial elements like cost of goods, which itself affects the proportion of profit. This is where ratio analysis becomes a useful instrument. It allows us to draw the link between two different sales figures and two different cost of goods figures and eventually makes results comparable between two organisations. Lasher (2014) added that ratios are only valuable as a tool when they are compared with the ratios of other companies. To make investment decisions easier, we will compare industry averages later in the report.

Examining financial ratios for a particular period of time can be used to identify unusual changes thus alerting the management on the progress of the business venture. Financial ratios are also helpful in carrying out financial analysis and forecasting. They also allow the owner of the business and the entire management to come up with business specific goals that can easily be traced to determine the company’s progress towards achieving them.

Financial ratios have proven to be a useful tool for effective financial management and planning. Primarily known for improving the understanding of financial results and trends over time, financial ratios are a unique way to provide a quantitative analysis to communicate overall organizational performance. This tool is useful for managers to focus in on the company’s strengths and weaknesses from which strategies and operations can be formed. Investors are also commonly known to use ratios to measure results against other companies to make appropriate judgments regarding management effectiveness and mission impact. For ratios to be deemed meaningful and useful, they require reliable and accurate calculated information. This is simple

Financial ratios provide a means to analyze the operations of a company in comparison to its industry and its historical results.

Ratio analysis is used to evaluate relationships among financial statement items. The ratios are used to identify trends over time for one company or to compare two or more companies at one point in time. Financial statement ratio analysis focuses on three key aspects of a business: liquidity, profitability, and solvency.

Firms and Companies include ‘Ratios’ in their external report to which it can be referred as ‘highlights’. Only with the help of ratios the financial statements are meaningful. It is therefore, not surprising that ratio analysis feature are prominently in the literature on financial management. According to Mcleary (1992) ratio means “an expression of a relationship between any two figures or groups of figures in the financial statements of an undertaking”.

Ratio analysis is generally used by the company to provide some information on how the company has performed during that year, so that the parties involved including shareholders, lenders, investors, government and other users could make some analysis before making any further decision towards that particular company. As mentioned by Gibson (1982a cited in British Accounting Review, 2002 pg. 290) where he believes that the use of ratio analysis is such an effective tool to evaluate the company’s finance, and to predict its future financial state. Ratios are simply divided in several categories; these are the profitability, liquidity, efficiency and gearing.