Financial Intelligence, Revised Edition: A Manager's Guide to Knowing What the Numbers Really Mean

The key ratio that measures accounts receivable, as we saw in part 5, is days sales outstanding, or DSO—that is, the average number of days it takes to collect on these receivables. The longer a company’s DSO, the more working capital is required to run the business.

Reconciliation In a financial context, reconciliation means getting the cash line on a company’s balance sheet to match the actual cash the company has in the bank—sort of like balancing your checkbook, but on a larger scale.

Accruals An accrual is the portion of a revenue or expense item that is recorded in a particular time span. Product development costs, for instance, are likely to be spread out over several accounting periods, and so a portion of the total cost will be accrued each month. The purpose of accruals is to match costs to revenues in a given time period

Operating Expenses Operating expenses are the costs required to keep the business going from day to day. They include salaries, benefits, and insurance costs, among a host of other items. Operating expenses are listed on the income statement and are subtracted from revenue to determine profit.

First, here’s another way of looking at IRR: it’s the hurdle rate that makes net present value equal to zero. Remember, we said that as discount rates increase, NPV decreases? If you did NPV calculations using a higher and higher interest rate, you’d find NPV getting smaller and smaller until it finally turned negative, meaning the project no longe

Now move from an individual to a business. Same concepts, different language: • What the company owns is called its assets. • What it owes is called its liabilities. • What it’s worth is called owners’ equity or shareholders’ equity. And the basic equation now looks like this: or this:

The Big Five are: • Revenue growth from one year to the next • Earnings per share (EPS) • Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) • Free cash flow (FCF) • Return on total capital (ROTC) or return on equity (ROE). ROE is the right metric for financial businesses such as banks and insurance companies.

operating expense reduces the bottom line immediately, and a capital expenditure spreads the hit out over several accounting periods.

Equity Equity is the shareholders’ “stake” in the company as measured by accounting rules. It’s also called the company’s book value. In accounting terms, equity is always assets minus liabilities; it is also the sum of all capital paid in by shareholders plus any profits earned by the company since its inception minus dividends paid out to shareho