Justify your judgements by presenting appropriate accounting information and evidence

PART 1.

Individual investigation

a) Download the Financial Data spreadsheet for your selected company with data for years ended 2014 thru 2016 inclusive;

b) Download Annual Reports for 2014, 2015, and 2016 for your selected company;

c) Critically review the use of ROA (Return on Assets) as an indicator for your purposes of how a company’s resources are used to generate wealth, and how different companies might measure it in different ways. Decide 3 asset categories (items) and 1 income statement item which you think will require closer inspection before you rely on ROA information to form your opinion about how well resources are used to generate wealth. For each of these financial statement items, present the relevant financial information for each of the three years, describe the company’s choice of respective accounting policy, and any methods of making relevant estimates;

d) In essay form, write your initial impressions of how well the company is using its resources to generate wealth and rate it on a scale of 1 to 10 (10 = excellent, 5 = satisfactory, 1 = very unsatisfactory)

1. Justify your judgements by presenting appropriate accounting information and evidence (e.g. from the Company Report). In your evaluation of the company’s performance, you should take account of o Relevant information in the Annual Reports, e.g. Director and CEO Reports; e.g. explanations for the level of profits generated from assets and how the level varied annually between 2014 and 2016 o How well the financial information reflects the “real world”; o Choices of, or changes over time in accounting policies, and in the measurement or estimation of items; o Reported ratios, i.e. return on assets, asset turnover, profitability ; o Other ways in which the limitations of the company’s financial statements should be considered;