Reading what a company actually reports.
11 topics · 18 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Beginners' Guide to Financial Statements
U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission · 2007
Walks a first-time reader through the balance sheet, income statement, cash flow statement and statement of shareholders' equity as the four…
+2 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Auditing Theory and Practice
Robert H. Montgomery · 1912
Codifies the young profession of independent auditing into a coherent method at a moment when an 'auditor' still meant something closer to a…
+3 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
An Empirical Evaluation of Accounting Income Numbers
Ray Ball & Philip Brown · 1968
Shows that a company's stock price drifts in the direction of its eventual reported earnings surprise for months before the announcement, giving the…
+10 more at this level
12 of 18 works
U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission
Walks a first-time reader through the balance sheet, income statement, cash flow statement and statement of shareholders' equity as the four documents every public company must file, explaining what each answers and how the three others tie back to the balance sheet.
Mitchell Franklin, Patty Graybeal and Dixon Cooper
Builds the financial statements from the accounting equation, showing that the balance sheet, income statement and cash flow statement are three views of one set of transactions rather than separate reports.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Mitchell Franklin, Patty Graybeal & Dixon Cooper
Builds managerial accounting from the decisions it exists to support — costing a product, setting a budget, deciding whether to make or buy — rather than from bookkeeping rules aimed at outside investors.
Robert H. Montgomery
Codifies the young profession of independent auditing into a coherent method at a moment when an 'auditor' still meant something closer to a bookkeeper checking sums than an independent verifier of a company's accounts.
U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission
Sets out the SEC staff's view of when revenue may be recognised under existing rules, issued after a wave of aggressive revenue recognition at companies whose auditors had let form override substance.
Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission
Analyses every SEC fraud enforcement action against a public company over a decade and finds the same small set of techniques recurring — fictitious revenue and overstated assets chief among them — usually with the CEO personally involved.
International Public Sector Accounting Standards Board
Argues governments should recognise revenue and expense when they are earned and incurred rather than when cash moves, and lays out a practical sequence for making that shift without breaking budgeting along the way.
Ray Ball & Philip Brown
Shows that a company's stock price drifts in the direction of its eventual reported earnings surprise for months before the announcement, giving the first direct evidence that accounting income numbers carry real information investors act on.
Edward I. Altman
Combines five ordinary financial ratios into a single Z-score and shows it predicts corporate bankruptcy up to two years ahead far more reliably than any one ratio read alone.
Financial Accounting Standards Board
Sets out four criteria an item must meet before it can appear on the income statement at all — definition, measurability, relevance and reliability — arguing recognition is a deliberate test, not an automatic consequence of a transaction occurring.
Financial Accounting Standards Board
Defines the ten elements that make up a balance sheet and income statement together — assets, liabilities, equity, revenues, expenses, gains and losses among them — replacing ad hoc bookkeeping categories with a single conceptual structure every later standard builds on.
Financial Accounting Standards Board
Requires every business to separate its cash flows into operating, investing and financing activities, on the argument that net income alone cannot tell a reader whether a profitable company is generating cash or quietly burning it.