ACCT2006 Financial Reporting

Instructions
In your pairs (on-campus students), you will have already chosen an ASX listed company.  Your assignment will require the comparison and analysis of their last two published annual reports. You will therefore need to obtain copies of their two most recently published annual reports. Depending on when your chosen company publishes their reports, these may be the reports for 2016-17 and 2017-18; 2017 and 2018; or 2017-18 and 2018-19.
Your analysis will be presented in report format. You will need to use Excel, Word and finally PDF to prepare your report.
Requirement one – preparation in excel
Once you have obtained the two annual reports, transfer their income statement, balance  sheet, statement of changes in equity and statement of cash flows into an excel spreadsheet.
1a) Prepare an excel spreadsheet with these financial statements. Ensure that the statements are formatted in a professional and attractive manner.
1b) Use formulas in excel to verify that the totals shown in the financial statements have been correctly calculated.
1c) Also transfer the notes to the reports into your spreadsheet. You do not need to transfer  the written descriptions found in each note, but you do need to transfer all accounts, numbers and calculation
Requirement two – analysis in word
Once you have transferred the financial statements and notes into excel, you will then prepare a report (using Microsoft Word, or a similar word processing program) which analyses some aspects of these reports.
Your report must be formatted in a professional and attractive manner
YouTube resources) for some guidance on what constitutes professional and attractive formatting in Word.
Further, your report must follow the conventions of report formatting
Anybody who reads a report will expect some context to help them understand what they are  reading. Therefore the first section of your report will have to provide the reader with a brief introduction to the company you are analysing.
2a) Provide the reader with an introduction to the company you are analysing. This introduction should provide the reader with a basic understanding of what they do, which industry they  operate in, the company information and when their financial statements are prepared. As a  minimum, we are looking for you to tell the reader the company the industry is in, when it was  formed, what their structure is, what its market capitalisation is and who their auditors are. Your analysis is based on the information contained in the reports the company has published, so the reader has to know to what time period the reports relate.
2b) Identify both the time period for which the reports refer and when the reports were published. Before you can compare the financial reports from year to year, you must determine whether this can be done quickly and easily, or whether deeper analysis of the presented information is required.
2c) Compare the notes to the financial statements. Each year, was the same amount of information provided in the notes? State your findings. If the amount of notes (or the information provided in them) differ, identify the differences. Note whether the differing information was an addition to the newer report, or if it was a removal from the older report. If there are differences, for what reason(s) do you think the changes were made? Support your
reasoning with references.Financial statements provide references to prior year data to allow for comparison. However, it is important to establish the reliability of any comparative information before relying on it.
2d) Identify the figures provided in the older of the two reports. These figures will also be stated in the newer report, so that you can compare the results between the most recent and the second most recent year
. Compare the figures as stated in both reports
. Are they the same?