Understanding and Using Corporate Financial Statements

I hope that this text will contribute to debunking the idea that accounting is impenetrable to all but accountants. It is my strong belief that the significance of the contents of a set of financial statements can be identified without a professional accounting training. This text is testament to that belief. It is my hope that all the readers will provide further testament to it. Thus, it is a book that is designed to quickly allow non-accountants to access key accounting information. This text is based on a course that I have given to MBA students for many years. The great majority of these students had little or no exposure to accounting and, while appreciating its potential value to them, they were, at least initially, extremely apprehensive about its impenetrable terminology and highly quantitative reputation. Consequently, the challenge confronting me was to devise an approach which eliminated much of the complexity and detail of accounting and which allowed students to quickly assimilate the nature and meaning of financial statements as a basis for becoming intelligent readers and users of them.