A company reports accounting data in its financial statements. This data is used for financial analyses that provide insights into a company’s strengths, weaknesses, performance in specific areas, and trends in performance. These analyses are often used to compare a company’s performance to that of its competitors or to its past or expected future performance. Such insight helps managers and analysts improve their decision making.

Consider the following scenario:
You work for a brokerage firm. Your boss asked you to analyze Blue Parrot Manufacturing's performance for the past three years and to write a report that includes a benchmarking Of the company's performance.
Which of the following components would be best for you to include in your financial statement analysis?

a. A calculation Of financial ratios and an evaluation Of the comparative trends in the firm's financial position and performance over a certain time period.
b. A critique of the company's financial statements and a report of any misprints to be sent to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Awidower devised his fee simple interest in his residence as follows: “to my daughter for life, then to my oldest grandchild who survives her.” at the time of the widower’s death, he was survived by his only two children, a son and a daughter, and by one grandchild, his daughter’s son. a short time later, the daughter together with her son entered into a contract to sell the residence in fee simple to a buyer. the applicable jurisdiction continues to follow the common law rule against perpetuities, but has abrogated the rule in shelley’s case. at the closing, the buyer refused to purchase the residence. can the sellers compel the buyer to do so?

Fred smithers, a recent college graduate decided to open his own portable juice bar, smithers smoothies, to wheel around newport beach. you, a trusted friend of fred, are a business major that has also recently graduated and agreed to handle the books for a while to get some practical experience and have a favor that you can ask of fred in the future. given the following five transactions concerning the new venture, prepare the necessary journal entries for the transactions, post the journal entries to appropriate t accounts and prepare a trial balance as of the end of the month in order to answer to the necessary may 2: fred invests $12,000 of his own money to start the new company. this money was obtained from a part-time job working at a legal firm while he was in school. may 3: fred spent $5,100 cash to purchase a refrigerated trailer that he can pull behind his car and set up at the beach. under your advice, fred agrees to place the new asset under an account called "equipment." may 6: fred bought $640 of supplies on account from the flav-o-rite confectioners company. because they will last longer than a single accounting period fred agrees to record them as, "supplies" as per your suggestion. may 13: fred sat on the beach for six hours without a single sale and was feeling very down. right before he left, however, a plumber escorting his family reunion along the beach stopped by his stand and bought $800 worth of smoothies for the entire family. under your advice, fred agrees to call this cash revenue, "sales." may 15: excited about his new venture, fred withdraws $350 from the company to take his girlfriend out to dinner. what would be the balance in the cash account at the end of the period following the posting of all the transactions?

Qwest airlines has implemented a program to recycle all plastic drink cups used on their aircraft. their goal is to generate $7 million by the end of the recycle program's five-year life. each recycled cup can be sold for $0.005 (1/2 cent). a. how many cups must be recycled annually to meet this goal? assume uniform annual plastic cup usage and a 0% interest rate. b. repeat part (a) when the annual interest rate is 12%. c. why is the answer to part (b) less than the answer to part (a)?