The Value Of A Company

When analysts question a firm’s earnings quality, it raises concerns regarding under or over aggressive accounting practices that may be allowing the firm to manipulate the earnings. Earnings quality is defined as the strength of the current earnings in being used to predict future earnings and cash flows. Since earning quality is indicative of future performance, analysts are more likely to address issues that have substantial impact on the earnings quality. An issue arises when the nature of the earnings is questioned. While permanent earnings are part of normal operations, any irregular, one time earnings can skew the earnings, making the firm look more profitable than it is. This is due to the inability to recreate similar one-time transactions that will give rise to such numbers. Investors prefer predictable

A form of financing in which large capital expenditures are kept off of a company 's balance sheet through various classification methods. Companies will often use off-balance-sheet financing to keep their debt to equity (D/E) and leverage ratios low, especially if the inclusion of a large expenditure would break negative debt covenants.

Understandably, there are a variety of ways in which a company can manage their earnings, and if accomplished successfully, the results can be highly profitable. Not all techniques are fraudulent, as effective earnings management is considered good for business and shareholders. Income smoothing is a specific example of permissible earnings management that involves controlling fluctuations in net income to make earnings less variable over a given period of time (Goel & Thakor, 2003). Smoothing is acceptable as long as it adheres to the restrictions of U.S. GAAP, which maintains that all revenues and expenses are accounted for in a defined fashion. There are a lot of incentives in figuring how to effectively smooth income, as substantial value can be created through the successful arrangement of financial transactions. Management is able to make more intelligent decisions with regards to the future of the firm if the earnings are able to match the forecasts. One instance this is seen is when management is faced with the decision to smooth total income or

Such an intense focus has been placed on quarterly earnings as an indication of a company’s success by everyone from analysts to executives that ethics have for the most part been thrown out the window, sacrificed to the all important number, i.e. earnings per share. This is the theory in Alex Berenson’s book “The Number: How the Drive for Quarterly Earnings Corrupted Wall Street and Corporate America.” This number has become part of a game to be played, a figure to be manipulated – beat the number and Wall Street all but throws a parade, miss it and a company’s stock may be abandoned. Take into account the incentives that executives have to beat the number and one can find plenty of reasons to manage earnings.

(Ohara, 2007) Most financial statements are made public for the benefit of stakeholders and potential investors. The bottom-line is that financial statements are the main source for analyzing how well a company is operating. The income (or profit and loss) statement is simply a report card of how much activity (revenue) was performed in the period, how profitable that activity was (gross profit/loss), and what it cost the contractor to run the business (overhead). (Murphy, 2006)

There are a number of areas on the earnings statement that provide management with opportunities for influencing the outcome of reported earnings.

In this research paper the authors want to express their thoughts by stating that how to them earnings reporting pertains to the discovery of information that has not been disclosed by either people or other types of sources and focus towards the negative in this study. In my opinion, the title of the paper itself could have had a different title only because throughout the paper it analyzes negative or bad news rather than really paying attention to both perspectives. Also the paper captures the information or news that occurs by using a three day window in which Quarterly Earnings Announcement (QEA) take place and compares it to a period where it does not take place. Furthermore, in this paper there are three hypotheses that arise

Companies often try to keep accounting earnings growing at a relatively steady pace in an effort to avoid large swings in earnings from period to period. They also try to manage earnings targets. Reflect on these practices and discuss the following in your discussion post.

VIII. Earnings per Share (EPS) is used by analysts and potential investors to evaluate the profitability of a company.

Preparing different income statements captures information in diverse ways to facilitate decision making on internal matters. The management needs to understand cost behavior in order to control the costs. Besides the production costs, changing sales patterns affects profitability and there is a need to achieve better sales accuracy after understanding cost behavior. Variable costing also captures information about the impact of changing operation on profitability and the management is better placed to make pricing decisions to maximize

This Income Statement also known as the Earnings Statements or statement of operation, is one of the four Financial Statement used by accountants, business owner’s, and investors. The Income Statement provides a detailed look into how profitable a business has been over a designated period of time.

The most important role of financial reports is to effectively communicate financial information to outsiders in a timely and credible manner (FASB, 1984). Earnings are vital in financial statements because earnings represent the company’s value. Investors and creditors always look to

* With a focus on net income, managers could be incentivized to maximize ROE at the expense of other stakeholders, particularly bondholders. For instance, managers may fuel earnings growth by over-levering the company to benefit from tax shields in order to increase the value spread.  In addition, there are many other ways in which managers can manipulate earnings, for example, by slowing down depreciation charges or selling off assets to realize extraordinary gains.

Ball, R / Shivakumar L. (2005): Earnings quality in UK private firms: comparative loss recognition timeliness, Journal of Accounting and Economics Vol. 39, 2005, pp. 83–128.

I. Introduction of company valuation methods and process........................................................3 1. Abstract................................................................................................................................3 2. Valuation methods...............................................................................................................3 2.1 Balance sheets – Based methods