CCT 224
	Performance Assessment
A 3rd year course in the CCIT Program of University of Toronto at Mississauga

ASSIGNMENT 2 - Financial Statements

This assignment requires you to
(1) obtain information about the financial statements of a company
(2) in an ordered way, write out the information you research
(3) submit the information to the professor
 

Procedure and Organization

In class Oct 12th the professor will divide the class into  groups according to the alphabetical order of the class list. If you did not attend this Oct 12th class, you will still be held responsible for contacting the other members in the group. If group members are not able to contact a particular group member, or that person does not respond to emails or phone calls, the group is welcome to continue the project on without that person(s). When you submit the work , it is presumed that if a name is on the cover page as a group member, then that person participated (so do not put someone's name on the cover if they did not equally contribute to the work) see this video on group work  youtube.com/watch?v=ybZbld2gyLI

What you do

Go back in time and pay attention to the discussion in class Friday morning Oct 19th (or re-read witiger.com/internationalbusiness/financial-statements.htm) and listen carefully to Richardson's explanations of "reasons why", and "limitations of" about financial statements. Also pay attention to the purpose and usefulness of having accurate statements and what effects that accuracy.

Analyze specific numerical data (financial statements) of a medium or large sized public company operating in Canada
The purpose is to "evaluate their performance"

Appreciate that not all performance is specifically quantitative, but, for investors, numbers are usually the key
... facebook "likes" don't always cause the stock price to rise.
 
 
 

Tim S. adds

So basically for the assignment you are required to pick a company (it says Canadian and you should stick to that, unless you have a really good company to do in the U.S., Europe or Asia) analyze its financial statements in terms of the 6 environments. So first thing's first, for anyone who wasn't in class today or didn't hear Tim S's explanation, any easy way to pull up a company's financial statements is to go on their company website and find a tab called investors or investor relations   (something with investors) and then you can pull up their financial statements of the respective company. A couple groups were asking Tim S. what to do with the financial statements once you have them. Basically what's     required is that, you apply the 6 environments to the financial statements. Eg, With the example Tim S. showed in class, British Petroleum. Their financials in terms of assets, accounts receivable, etc. was fine in 2008, 2009 but in 2010 they dropped. Why? Because of that huge oil spill. So in this case you would discuss how the 6 environments had an impact on their financials. Eg."The economic environment was effected because due to that     incident, the debt-to-equity ratio went up in 2010, share prices dropped, etc" and then I would go discussing how     the other 5 environments were affected as well. (of course in a lot more detail) In general, when you're analyzing the financial statements, regardless if the company has been growing or  diminishing over the years, discuss how the 6 environments has played a part in that in terms of the company's  financials (revenues, assets, etc.) At the end of the report, just include a short discussion of the company's performance currently, and maybe even include how you might see them in a couple years. There is no page limit on this assignment but at the same time we are looking for quality over quantity. If you are hitting like 20-30+ pages, make sure every page and every  bit of information you include has any relevance to what you are talking about. If you're talking about a certain  part of the financial statement, maybe just cut of that part and put it an appendix, don't print out like 10 pages of     financial statements. Hopefully this explanation gives you guys a better understanding of the report. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to e-mail  timothy.selvarajah AT mail.utoronto.ca If you're still unsure of what to do, I'll try to give a more in-depth explanation. And yes you  can change your project any time you want if you are unsatisfied with the direction it's going so far.

 

+ make sure you review these videos as to how it should appear.
 

Group Work - what the Report should look like - binding, pages, table of contents		Group Work / Reports Part 2 The importance of using "Mature Language" in your writing		Group Work / Reports Part 3 important considerations		Group Work / Reports Part 4 Coordinating the submission Communication w group members

hint, do a company with problems, there are more things to discuss.