Читать книгу Corporate Finance For Dummies онлайн

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Corporate income statements work a lot like your personal finances: You start with the amount of money you make and then subtract all your costs to find out how much you have left to put in the bank, buy a new vacation home, or join a professional Ping-Pong team.

The main difference is that corporate income statements probably include more information overall than your personal income statement. In fact, a company’s income statement breaks down how much money it’s making versus how much it’s spending into six main categories. Together, these six categories detail the company’s costs and revenues, separating them by their source operations. I cover each of these categories in the following sections.

The first portion of the income statement, called gross profit, seeks to calculate the profitability of a company’s operations after direct costs. Its ultimate goal is to determine the company’s gross margin.

For example, if you’re a self-employed window washer, your margin is all the money you make for washing windows, minus the cost of the materials you used to wash those windows (for example, soap, water, and other supplies), but not the cost of your ladder because you use it over and over again.