Principles of Accounting
You will select a company from this list, and you will analyze the company's financial performance, highlighting accounting principles and methods learned in this course. This project requires you to present, review, and analyze the organization's published annual reports and related footnotes for the last 2 years. Specifically, your paper will cover the following:
• Discuss methods used to account for assets, liabilities, and shareholder equity, and explain how the company's inventory valuation method affects reported results.
• Explain the company's approach to internal controls, and assess its compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley.
• Prepare and interpret the results of horizontal and vertical analyses of the financial statements.
• Prepare and interpret the results of at least 5 ratios, 1 from each of the following categories:
o Profit Ratios
o Debt Ratios
o Efficiency Ratios
o Equity Ratios
o Liquidity Ratios
• Assess the company's overall financial performance and the integrity of its internal controls.
• Discuss how various stakeholders-internal and external-use information contained in the financial statements for decision making.
Include the last 2 years of published financial statements as Appendices to your report. Do not include the entire Annual Reports.
Present your findings as a Word document of 5-6 pages formatted in APA style.
Submitting your assignment in APA format means, at a minimum, you will need the following:
• Title page: Remember the running head and title in all capital letters.
• Body: The body of your paper begins on the page following the title page and it must be double-spaced between paragraphs. The typeface should be 12-pt. Times Roman or 12-pt. Courier in regular black type. Do not use color, bold type, or italics except as required for APA level headings and references. The deliverable length of the body of your paper for this assignment is 5-6 pages. In-text academic citations to support your decisions and analysis are required. A variety of academic sources is encouraged.
• Reference page: References that align with your in-text academic sources are listed on the final page of your paper. The references must be in APA format using appropriate spacing, hang indention, italics, and upper- and lower-case usage as appropriate for the type of resource used. Remember, the reference page is not a bibliography, but it is a further listing of the abbreviated in-text citations used in the paper. Every referenced item must have a corresponding in-text citation.
• Appendices: Include the last 2 years of the company's published financial statements.
Reference
Fortune. (2015). Fortune 500 2015. Retrieved from http://fortune.com/fortune500/