Understanding financial statements, 9th ed.

Abstract

In each of the previous editions of Understanding Financial Statements, my coauthor Aileen Ormiston and I have attempted to take the reader behind the numbers, dazzling presentations, and slick annual report marketing to assess the "real" financial condition and performance of U.S. companies. W hile that remains our objective, we are also looking ahead in this ninth edition to the major changes for U.S. financial statements that will result from the adoption of global financial reporting standards. Aileen and I were saddened to learn of the death in May 2007 of Lawrence Revsine, Distinguished Professor of Financial Accounting at the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University. We shared Professor Revsine's vision of how to teach financial accounting. On a personal note, I would add that when my daughter was a student at UCLA and using one of his texts, she occasionally called her mom for help; that collaboration and his approach to analyzing financial statements inspired the writing by Aileen and me, following the collapse of Enron, of our book Understanding the Corporate Annual Report, Nuts, Bolts, and a Few Loose Screws (Prentice Hall2003). Along with many others in the accounting profession and in accounting education, we acknowledge and appreciate the tremendous contributions made by Professor Revsine. Readers also have come to await anxiously a reporting update on the authors' children in each edition. My own daughter Eleanor, who was in grade school when I began this book, currently is Senior Head of TV, Catalogue and IndiVision Film for NBC-Universal in London after completing an MBA at UCLA's Anderson School of Management. Aileen's son Josh, three y ears old when his mother helped me on the first book, holds an MBA from Texas A&M University and works in Arizona for Piper Jaffray, an investment banking firm. Daughter Jacqui, age one for the first edition, completed a master's degree at Arizona State University and is now a colleague of Aileen's at Mesa Community College where she teaches math.