FIN 382 Final Project

I. Choice of Companies and an Overview of Their Operations and Industry – briefly outline what the company does and its industry. (5 pts)
II. Discussion of Current Issues Impacting Financial Statements – include any relevant current event information, news that has affected financial statements, or world events that could impact the businesses. Research will have to be done on this. Some good sources of information include the most recent annual reports for each company (these can be found online for all publicly traded companies; utilize the most current year end annual reports available), Yahoo! Finance, the MSN Money website (this will provide current information on your company and some ratio information), and various business magazines. You can find the websites suggested under the Webliography tab in the course. A minimum of one business article needs to be utilized that is under one year written. You must cite the source of the article. This should only be one paragraph for your company, not the competitor. (5 pts)
III. Relevant Ratios and Discussion – list what ratios you think are relevant to your companies and industry. Go to the Excel spreadsheet in Doc Sharing, review the ratios listed under the ratio tab, and pick what you think may be relevant. In two paragraphs (no more), briefly discuss six ratios you think may be important, and at least one ratio must be included from each ratio category. The ratios will be automatically calculated on the spreadsheet (please see section IV regarding this). DO NOT manually calculate these ratios..they will be done on the ss (10 pts)

IV. Excel Spreadsheet FinSAS.xlsx – Manually input the financial data for your company under the Input tab on the spreadsheet. The ss can be found in doc sharing. Download it and save it to your computer and back it up. You should insert numbers highlighted only in blue. These numbers should be found in the company’s most recent year end annual reports (utilize the most year end numbers; the spreadsheet has it starting at 2008, but change the year to 2011 and go five years historically from there to 2007), which can be obtained online under your company choice. Complete a separate spreadsheet for each company. Write here that you completed the input for the spreadsheet for both companies and that the spreadsheet works. To check this, once you input the data in the input tab only, check the other tabs (ratio, vertical analysis) to ensure that you see the automated calculations. ONLY INPUT INTO THE INPUT TABS..the spreadsheet will then calculate everything else. Download and save the document on your computer and back it up. (20 pts)
V. Bibliography – you should start this and have a few sources at this point including the article and annual report you are utilizing.