About this Assignment
For the Corporate Finance 301 assignment, you will submit a research paper that analyzes an organization’s financial status by examining the financial statements that are publicly available through an online inquiry. A publicly-traded organization will be the foundation of this research paper. Possible organizations and industries to choose from include software development, retail, hospitality, the payment card industry, energy & utilities, and healthcare. You will apply knowledge acquired in the course and the research paper should follow APA formatting style. Audience: upper-level business students.
Project Prompt
Write a 1,000-1,200-word analysis discussing a company’s financial situation by evaluating corporate financial data. Select a publicly-traded organization and analyze the company’s key financial statements from the most recent year.
Balance sheet
Income statement
Cash flow statement
(The statements may be found in a recent annual report; in the company’s 10K filing on the SEC’s EDGAR database; or from other sources.)
Explain the purpose of each of the three corporate financial statements and describe the data categories within each statement based on concepts studied in the course. Analyze the data in each financial statement (balance, income, cash flow) and explain what the financial data indicates regarding the financial position of the corporation.
You may refer to the course material for supporting evidence, but you must also use at least three credible, outside sources and cite them using APA format. Please include a mix of both primary and secondary sources, with at least one source from a scholarly peer-reviewed journal. If you use any Study.com lessons as sources, please also cite them in APA (including the lesson title and instructor’s name).
Primary sources are first-hand accounts such as interviews, advertisements, speeches, company documents, statements, and press releases published by the company in question.
Secondary sources come from peer-reviewed scholarly journals, such as the Journal of Management. You may use like JSTOR, Google Scholar, and Social Science Research Network to find articles from these journals. Secondary sources may also come from reputable websites with .gov, .edu, or .org in the domain. (Wikipedia is not a reputable source, though the sources listed in Wikipedia articles may be acceptable.)
