Mary Francis comes into your office later that morning.

"Tim told me he talked to you about the compliance issue with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX)," she says. "Your first priority is to review Apex's financial statements. Once you're familiar with our financial history, I want you to prepare a presentation that may be shared with potential stockholders. We want to be ready for the initial public offering (IPO) in a few weeks' time."

"Okay," you say. "I anticipated this after talking with Tim, so I started reviewing the data after he left my office."

"Very good," she says. "I'm certain you can provide potential stockholders with just the right information to highlight our financial performance and trends for the first two periods. They should be able to see why we need to expand, and why the opportunity is great for them as future investors."

"What type of presentation do you have in mind, Mary?"

"PowerPoint presentations have been useful in the past," she says. "Because different people will be making these presentations, make sure to include slide notes so we communicate consistent information. Tell you what, let's go over how the slides should be organized. I've done similar presentations, so I can save you some time with a few pointers."

After Mary leaves your office, you type out your notes about each aspect of performance you discussed and the overall organization of the presentation. Your presentation should cover the following, with Title and Reference slides, totaling 7 slides:

• Slide 1: Overview of Apex Printing, the company
• Slide 2: The company's total profit
• Slide 3: The company's cash flow from operating activities
• Slide 4: The company's cash flow from investing and financing activities (include primary sources and uses of cash in each area)
• Slide 5: The company's total cash, inventory, and retained earnings (include 2-year trend for each)

It will be necessary to include trend analyses of critical financial statement elements, as well.

Before you leave the office that same day, you get call from Mary.

"One more thing about the presentation you're working on," she says. "I think a brief explanation about each element would be useful for our audience. Most of them won't have a financial background, so you should explain-again, briefly-how the financial statement on which the element is found is linked to other financial statements. Does that make sense?"

"Yes, it does," you say. "I'll keep the audience's perspective in mind. What do you think about adding some graphs to show general trends of financial performance? Too much or useful?"

"Good idea," she says. "Let me see what you come up with by the end of the week."