公司财务管理第三章.pptVIP

Technically, the sales figure should be credit sales. This is often difficult to determine from the income statements provided in annual reports. If you use total sales instead of credit sales, you will overstate your turnover level. You need to recognize this bias when credit sales are unavailable, particularly if a large portion of the sales are cash sales. As with inventory turnover, you can use either ending receivables or an average of beginning and ending. You also run into the same seasonal issues as discussed with inventory. Probably the best benchmark for days’ sales in receivables is the company’s credit terms. If the company offers a discount (1/10 net 30), then you would like to see days’ sales in receivables less than 30. If the company does not offer a discount (net 30), then you would like to see days’ sales in receivables close to the net terms. If days’ sales in receivables is substantially larger than the net terms, then you first need to look for biases, such as seasonality in sales. If this does not provide an explanation for the difference, then the company may need to take another look at its credit policy (who it grants credit to and its collection procedures). You can also compute the gross profit margin and the operating profit margin. Profit margin is one of the components of the Du Pont identity and is a measure of operating efficiency. It measures how well the firm controls the costs required to generate the revenues. It tells how much the firm earns for every dollar in sales. In the example, the firm earns almost $0.11 for each dollar in sales. Note that the ROA and ROE are returns on accounting numbers. As such, they are not directly comparable with returns found in the marketplace. ROA is sometimes referred to as ROI (return on investment). As with many of the ratios, there are variations in how they can be computed. The most important thing is to make sure that you are computing them the same way as the benchmark yo