Reporting the numbers: How to analyse and interpret financials

This intensive one-day course will teach you how to get to grips with financial reports.

By the end of the day you will be able to gut an annual report – and find the full story – in 10 minutes.

Course tutor: Peter Kirwan

Date: 6 June 2013
Time: 10.00-17.00
Venue: LMG Training Centre, Southwark, SE1 8NJ
Number of places: 10
Cost: £200 (+ £40 VAT)

Financial statements can be intimidating. But earnings statements, analyst presentations and annual reports are easier to interpret than you might think.

If you develop the ability to strip out the essentials from earnings reports, you will be able to write more detailed stories without missing deadlines.

Understanding the numbers will lead you to ask better questions and conduct more productive interviews. You'll be able to produce better graphics to accompany your stories. On occasion, it will also lead to exclusives. More generally, you'll develop a far more nuanced understanding of companies, industries and sectors.

The one-day course helps working journalists deal more confidently with the financials published by quoted (public) and limited (private) companies, as well as charities, partnerships and public sector bodies.

Understanding financial statements is only useful if it helps to do something. With that in mind, we ask you to be ready to collaborate: our sessions are studded with 10 to 15 minute mini-workshops, in which individuals and/or teams work against the clock to analyse financial statements and break the stories they contain (or in some cases, conceal).

You don't need to be a rocket scientist to benefit from this course. In most cases, you don't need a lot of maths ability to decode financial statements. (The equivalent of maths GCSE might be useful, but even this isn't essential.)

Course outline

What's on offer and how to get it:

Public companies
Private/limited companies
Offshore entities
Charities
Partnerships
Public sector
International
How to use Companies House and online sources
Financial data and FOIA

The Trinity: Three basic tools

The Profit and Loss Account
The Balance Sheet
The Cash Flow Statement

The corporate lifecycle

From start-up via IPO to going private
IPO: Going public
Public parent, Limited Subsidiaries

Other areas

Costs
Profit
Debt
Investors
What share prices tell us and what they don't tell us
Through the looking glass: When things aren't what they seem

Doing the job: Everyday tools for every journalist

Tools: Online and offline
Quick reading: How to gut an annual report in 10 minutes
Five metrics you should run on every company you cover
Sectors: How to build and maintain your own financial intelligence
Financials: A selection of classic libel risks
Staying clean: Ethics and insider dealing

Requirements:

Calculator
Google Drive account (for PDF-based documents and spreadsheets)
This course takes place in an IT suite so you will have access to a PC with Excel and a PDF reader.

Peter Kirwan

Peter Kirwan has been a business journalist for 20 years. He has written for the Guardian, Wired, Media Briefing and Press Gazette. (At Wired, he wrote a weekly column on media and technology called The Great Transition. At Press Gazette, between 2007 and 2011, he wrote the Media Money blog.)

Between 1996 and 2000, he was editor and then publisher of Computing, the trade weekly for IT professionals.

Over the years he has been on the receiving end of sufficient reaction to know that few things animate our leaders more than informed analysis of their financial dealings and performance.