Financial statements are formal documents that portray firms' business activities and financial performance. Firms prepare financial statements according to accounting standards and the information included in the financial statements has to be reliable and relevant to decision makers.
Firms usually prepare the following four financial statements
Financial statements can be both annual and quarterly. Moreover, you may find two different kinds of financial statements: consolidated and unconsolidated. The key distinction is that consolidated financial statements present the collective financial position, performance and cash flows of a group (i.e. the parent company and its subsidiaries), whereas unconsolidated financial statements specifically illustrate the financial position, performance and cash flows of an individual entity.
You can find paper books on financial statements in our reading rooms in the section: BM.51 - Financial Statements
To further expand your research, you can browse both paper and electronic resources on SearchLib, our Library discovery tool, searching by title or keywords (e.g. “financial statement”).