Annual Reports One Hundred and One

Book excerpt: An annual report is a powerful and revealing document about a company's financial standing, and can offer the savvy reader substantial insight about where the company may be headed in the future. But to the untrained eye, it may seem like walls of accounting technicalities provided to fill up space between the glossy photos and the upbeat "Message from the CEO."Annual Reports 101 gets past the PR machine to show the meaning behind the math. This straightforward guide reveals how to read the primary financial documents in the report, and then extract more information--from the numbers themselves and from the often fluffy text--than some companies want the public to know. The book shows how to watch out for "red flags," decipher footnotes and see past common practices that, while legal, may not give the most accurate picture. Readers of annual reports include potential investors and business partners, financial advisers, company employees, lenders and many others whose stake in the success of a public company is crucial to their own.