What is Financial Analysis? Types, Examples, and Techniques

Finance is a very important part of any business, it is like a tongue for any industry, and Financial analysis is a term used to describe the process of analyzing the characteristics of any business or business project.

 

Financial analysis includes deploying financial information to determine an organization's performance and create strategies about how it can be improved further. The financial analysis additionally centres around the sources of funds, which an organization has used for making its resources. 

 

Usually, financial analysts do their work in Excel, or using an accounting page to investigate historical information and make projections of how they figure the organization will act later on.

 

If you are an investor, then how can you decide where to invest and where not to? So, here financial statement analysis can help you a lot by making you aware of the financial condition of the company. Let's move towards deep discussion about financial analysis.

 

About Financial Analysis

 

Financial analysis is the procedure of assessing organizations, projects, financial plans, and other account-related exchanges to decide their performance and appropriateness. Commonly, financial analysis is used to break down whether an element is steady, fluid, or productive enough to warrant a financial investment. 

 

Whenever conducted internally, financial analysis can assist administrators with settling on future business choices or review historical trends for past triumphs. If directed externally, financial analysis can assist investors in picking the best possible investment opportunities.

 

Financial analysis is a fundamental piece of all business tasks as it encourages litigable insights into the health and limit of the association later on. Thus, there are several familiar means to analyze financial data such as measuring ratios from financial statements and correlating these ratios to historical data of companies or other opponent corporations. 

 

“I call it the Rule of Three. If you read a company's financial statements three times, and you still can't figure out how they make their money, that's usually for a reason”- James Chanos

 

In simple words, financial analysis helps company owners in understanding their business performance, financial status, and growth rate.

 

There are some key elements of financial analysis,such as 

• Income statement which indicates the performance of any business gains for a particular period,
• Balance sheet which indicates the financial statements like assets and liabilities, and
• Cash flow statement which indicates the cash inflows and outflows.

 

Examples of Financial analysis

 

To act as an illustration of fundamental analysis, Discover Financial Services announced its March 2021 earnings per share or EPS at $5.04 (quarterly report), and it was $2.59 in December 2020. 

 

A financial analyst, using fundamental analysis, would accept this as a positive indication of expanding the characteristic estimation of the security. Accordingly, future EPS projections are likewise assessed higher. 

 

 

Types of Financial Analysis

 

Two major types of financial analysis are fundamental analysis and technical analysis.

 

• Fundamental Analysis

 

The fundamental analysis gives you the point of view of an organization's characteristic incentive by analyzing related economic and monetary components. Normally, analysts use this procedure to assess the main considerations that impact security's worth.

 

Thus, fundamental analysis is a strategy that gives you a superior conviction to recognize organizations for long haul speculation and create wealth. 

 

Analysts lean toward this procedure to discover stocks that are presently exchanging at underestimated or exaggerated and afterwards choose an honest assessment of those stocks to help the investors in their investment choices. In this type, evidence gleaned from the financial statement is utilized to assume the company's worth.

 

(Related read: What is Fundamental Analysis?)

 

• Technical Analysis

 

On the other hand, in technical analysis analysts assess the investment openings by examining past measurable things, for example, volume and cost. Technical analysts accept that the costs of the stock are bound to follow the previous pattern instead of move abnormally.

 

In the stock market, everything is identified with market psychology, technical analysis uses past information outlines to dissect these feelings and market changes to all the more likely comprehend patterns identified with stock. 

 

• Technical analysts accept the way that history will rehash itself and we can better comprehend the occasions to contribute if we comprehend the previous examples or patterns.
• Technical analysis endeavours to comprehend the market emotion behind price trends by glancing for patterns and trends instead of evaluating a security’s fundamental aspects.

 

(Recommended blog: 10 Fundamentals of Technical Analysis)

 

Requirement of Financial Analysis Tools

 

Now, let's move towards tools of financial analysis. You may know that there are tools for financial analysis, but do you know why they are required? Here, we will discuss in detail about this.

 

It is significant to see how well a company is getting along and where it is going in the short and the long haul while investing in the stock market. This is the place where the tools of financial analysis come helpful.

 

It's insufficient to pore over an organization's budget report. To sort out the numbers one must utilize the techniques of financial statements analysis to extricate significant experiences into the organization's presentation.

 

Though, these techniques have far broader use beyond just the stock market. So, here we will see the list of exciting use trials of the tools of financial analysis.

 

• Banks can make verdicts on the solvency of a company by using these tools.

• Corporations can use these to make industry conclusions like where to distribute resources and which group to shutter.

• Security organizations and credit rating agencies could utilize the methods of financial analysis to examine several threats.

• Auditors and regulators might use these to sniff out feasible disparities in a corporation’s financial statement or even company transactions.

 

(Most related: 10 Largest Stock Exchanges in the World)

 

 

5 Techniques of Financial Analysis

 

Here we will see a list of some of the techniques of financial statement analysis that an investor can think of investing in a business.

 

1. Vertical Analysis

 

In this method, the factors of a business are shown in the form of a percentage of a fixed value. In this way, the percentage of all the factors can be used to determine where the business is heading. Also, this can be used to find out the relation between different factors and their effects on each other.

 

2. Trend Analysis

 

This method involves analyzing how stock markets are headed. This simply means that the stock prices will be determined beforehand. In this way, if the anticipated price is high, then it means investing will be profitable. If not, then it is a dull market.

 

Thus, this is one of the unique tools of financial analysis because it can be used to anticipate the effect of a range of outer factors on a stock.

 

3. Cash Flow Analysis

 

In this technique, the net income and expenses of a company are used to determine the working capital and net requirements of the business. Also, it determines the debt and expansion in the market.

 

4. Ratio Analysis

 

This method compares a particular company with its competition in the market. It simply means which other companies are of the same size and type.

 

These ratios include- earnings to price ratio, the net income to sales ratio, and the return on assets ratio. It can be used to determine the better company in the same industry.

 

5. Horizontal Analysis

 

Now, coming towards horizontal analysis, it is the most famous method of financial statement analysis. This method is generally used to identify the change in various factors of a business.

 

These factors include net income, sales, cost etc. The amount of change in these factors over a particular period helps in analyzing the future of any particular project or business.

 

(Recommended blog: What is FinTech?)

 

 

Conclusion

 

To understand and manage the business efficiently, one need to be fluent in the language of finance which means the capability to understand financial data as well as present data in the form of financial reports. Thus, in today’s time financial analysis is believed to be an important part of every industry. 

 

“Year-end financial statements express a truth about office life which is no less irrefutable yet also, in the end, no less irrelevant or irritating than an evolutionary biologist's proud reminder that the purpose of existence lies in the propagation of our genes”- Alain de Botton

 

Even, without this operating, a business would go fruitless. The finance analysis creates the conditions and peace of how the company runs its business. Investors got the idea of whether to invest in a particular company or not by seeing the financial statement analysis of the company. They value a company only by analyzing its financial position by reading its financial statements and calculating the ratios.

Running a business is not easy, but financial analysis helps you in maintaining the financial reports of the business that makes owners clear about previous transactions as well as future planning.