Any equity research report will include the historical financial performance of the company. The financial statements form the basis of facts for the company and those facts contribute to the determination of the buy, hold, or sell investment recommendation. For this assignment, you will use the Mergent database through the university library to retrieve 3 years of financial statements (i.e., the income statement, balance sheet, and statement of cash flow) for your chosen publicly traded company that pays dividends. You should use the same company you picked for your Post Your Introduction discussion forum. Then you will format that financial information using a spreadsheet program like Excel. The video below explains how to format your company’s financial information.

Title this assignment “Appendix A.” Be sure to save both formats (Excel and PDF) of these files for later use.

Note: You will use all of the assignments in Weeks 1 through 4 for your Week 5 final project for this course.

Prepare:

Prior to beginning work on this assignment,

• Complete the Week 1 – Learning Activity in Amplifire .
• Select a publicly traded company that pays dividends (per the instructions in the Week 1 – Post Your Introduction).
• Review the BUS401: Principles of Finance Research Guide (Links to an external site.). 
• Review the Excel resources in the BUS401: Principles of Finance Research Guide (Links to an external site.).
• Watch the following video that will help you format the financial statements for Appendix A:

Research:

Using the Mergent database in the university library,

• Find your chosen dividend-paying company within the Mergent (Links to an external site.) database.
• Follow the instructions in the video above to retrieve and format the 3 most recent years of historical financial statements (income statements, balance sheets, and statements of cash flows).

Construct Appendix A:

• Retrieve the 3 most recent years of historical financial statements (income statements, balance sheets, and statements of cash flows) for your chosen company using Mergent. Then using a program like Excel, and based on the instructions in the BUS401 | Retrieving Financial Statements Using Mergent (Links to an external site.) video.
  • Format the income statement.
  • Format the balance sheet.
  • Format the statement of cash flows.
• Save this Excel file as a PDF and title it “Appendix A.”

Historical Financial Statements: Appendix A PDF file

• Must contain the formatted income statement, balance sheet, and statement of cash flows for a company that has paid dividends for the last 4 to 5 years.