Financial managers can do certain things to increase or decrease net income that’s recorded in the year. This is called profit smoothing, income smoothing or just plain old window dressing. This isn’t the same as fraud, or cooking the books.
Most profit smoothing involves pushing some amount of revenue and/or expenses into other years than they would normally be recorded. A common technique for profit smoothing is to delay normal maintenance and repairs. This is referred to as deferred maintenance. Many routine and recurring maintenance costs required for autos, trucks, machines, equipment and buildings can be delayed, or deferred until later.
A business that spends a significant amount of money for employee training and development may delay these programs until the next year so the expense in the current year is lower.
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It’s obvious financial statement have a lot of numbers in them and at first glance it can seem unwieldy to read and understand. One way to interpret a financial report is to compute ratios, which means, divide a particular number in the financial report by another. Financial statement ratios are also useful because they enable the reader to compare a business’s current performance with its past performance or with another business’s performance, regardless of whether sales revenue or net income was bigger or smaller for the other years or the other business. In order words, using ratios can cancel out difference in company sizes.
There aren’t many ratios in financial reports. Publicly owned businesses are required to report just one ratio (earnings per share, or EPS) and privately-owned businesses generally don’t report any ratios. Generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) don’t require that any ratios be reported, except EPS for publicly owned companies.
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College education is not as simple as it was before. In fact, the cost of studying in college nowadays is becoming quite expensive, considering that there are now additional fees to be taken cared of. Aside from the tuition fees, you have the laboratory fees, college-bound books that should be purchased within the school premises, and other miscellaneous fees (for dental health, for instance). Add to it the cost of board and lodging as well as the food expenses if you decide to study in a college or university situated on other states.
If your family is financially-strapped that even your basic needs are not fully met, it will be a hard time for you to convince your parents to allow you to study in college. Getting a college degree will just remain to be one of your wildest dreams forever—not unless you do something to realize such dream.
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Getting through college is one of the most financially straining experiences that you will ever have during the course of your life. The expense is phenomenal and still rising, despite the fact that more and more families are falling below the poverty line. Without money though, there is no way that you could even consider going to college or staying on if you have already started, stay on there. This is unfortunately not very fair and the system does not tend to help students in need out, but there are individuals that you can go to for financial advice if you ever think you may be in need of a boost to keep you in college.
Getting a job is obviously the first step to help you get through college somewhat intact. Campuses often have job websites or notice boards that you can tap into if you need money and need it quickly. There are usually various resources of this nature available because it keeps any of the jobs going in student hands rather than giving the jobs to individuals outside of the college when the need is greater elsewhere. Depending on the size of the campus, the variety of jobs may actually be extensive. Failing that, there are probably experiments going on in the psychology department that will usually pay for the pleasure of exploring your mind. For a quick fix, this will do, but what about the more long term problems of staying at college when dubitation fees and housing fees come around again?
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