Using A Project/Case Study To Teach Financial Statement Analysis In The Introductory Business Finance Course

Abstract

This study presents a project, written in the form of a case study and accompanied by a Microsoft Excel template, to be assigned to an introductory course in business finance.  The objective is to give introductory finance students an application of financial statement analysis beyond that provided by the typical end-of-chapter problems.  The project is designed to enable students to link together the information provided by the several analytical tools—common size financial statements, analytical ratios, and the cash flow statement—and so obtain a complete picture of a firm’s financial performance over the past several years and relative to the average firm in the industry.