What is Financial Reporting?

Financial Reports are an integral part of understanding a company's financial health.

When you do your tax return, you prepare a summary of your income and deductions. This can include interest earned and/or share trading profits/losses. Financial reporting by a company is similar, but a lot more detailed than an individuals tax return usually is. A company's Financial Report is concerned with many measures of financial performance. This is different to an anlysis of a companies share price from a technical or charting perspective.

In most cases, financial reporting contains at least the following financial statements:

• Income Statement

• Balance Sheet

• Cash Flow Statement

• Profit and Loss Sheet

Public or listed companies are legally obligated to provide annual reports containing this information.

A typical company report is often more than 100 pages long and may contain a lot of information that a share trader is not interested in.

Trade radar has created a "summarised" company report that focusses on the key indicators and measures of a company's health. If you require more detail, we recommend locating and reading the companies publications. Trade Radar provides a Fundamental Performance Analysis. In the COmpany Report you will see a score out 100. This uses 23 fundmantal indicators to rate how well a company is doing against industry expected scores on those indicators. Please go to Indicator Defintions to read about the indicators used.