Valuation Tutor Lesson: Connecting the Dots

Overview


In the previous Valuation Tutor lessons, you have largely considered each statement in isolation of each other.  This type of analysis is required to gain the important insights that can be extracted for each statement.  In this lesson you will learn how to work across statements to evaluate a firm’s operating activities using the visual analytic tools provided by Valuation Tutor.  These tools allow you to “connect the dots” visually and then drill down to better understand how management is currently performing. 


First, you can literally extract different pieces of information from different financial statements using the “Data Collector” tab and then apply the visual tools to tease out relationships.  For example, suppose you want to focus closely upon a firm’s operating activities.  For this case you would like to examine Sales, Deferred Revenues, Cost of Sales, Gross Margin, Accounts Receivable, Inventory and Accounts Payable and then observe how these accounts are interrelated across the statements.  We illustrate this approach for 1-800-Flowers next.


Collect the data fields first by first selecting the Statement in the Left Hand Side (LHS) below, and clicking on the “Data Collector” tab in the right hand side (RHS).  To automatically transfer the data just double click on the desired field names (e.g., Net Revenue in the LHS below). 


Note: 1-800-Flowers do not have any Deferred Revenues.


 
Select Pie Chart (checked box above in the RHS of the screen).



Analyzing Cross Statement Relationships:  Revenue, Cost of Revenue and Cash Cycles
 
Operating activities can be further broken up into three subsets of activities:  revenue related activities (i.e., revenue cycle), cost of revenue related activities (i.e., cost of revenue cycle) and the cash conversion cycle. 
Revenue Related Activities
US GAAP has expended many resources on providing guidance for how to recognize revenue when a sale is made.  Generating revenue may be relatively straightforward for a typical retailer such as a Wal-Mart sale, that is either for cash or on account or card.  Revenue for a technology firm, however, is often complicated by the fact that a sale can involve a contract that specifies a bundled set of goods and services that unfold over time.  In this case the sale cannot be viewed as entirely revenue because some of this revenue has yet to be earned.  As a result, part is processed as deferred revenue until earned by performing the services or delivering the good. 
For revenue earned there are two general models that accounting applies.  First, is the merchant model of revenue recognition that allows gross revenue to be recognition.  This is appropriate for a Wal-Mart, who assumes the risk of carrying inventory, return policies etc.,.  It is not appropriate for a “Ticketmaster” type of business model who acts as an agent on behalf of the ultimate service provider.  In this case revenue must reported on a net as opposed to a gross basis and this is referred to as the agent model.  To make matters more confusing, many companies apply a combination of merchant and agent models when recognizing their revenues because each model may be appropriate for a subset of their goods and services.  That is both gross and net revenues are aggregated which require that analysts be alert for any significant changes that slip in for revenue recognition if disclosed.  This is because if a firm shifts from net to gross revenue reporting this can really boost revenue growth numbers!
Accounting for Revenue Related Activities:
Dr Cash or Accounts Receivable
    Cr Revenue
    Cr Deferred Revenue (Current and/or non-current)
Dr Deferred Revenue (non-current)
       Cr Deferred Revenue (current)
Dr Deferred Revenue (current)
       Cr Revenue
An analyst is interested in inferring whether revenue has been primarily driven by the first set of three entries or whether the latter set has played a role.  In addition, if it is the first three entries has credit been relaxed to help maintain revenues?
The second set of transactions is defined from the Cost of Revenue Related Activities:
Dr Cost of Sales and or Cost of Goods Sold
    Cr Inventory or Accounts Payable/Cash
Similarly, under the matching principle additional entries will be recognized such Marketing costs that are associated with selling goods and services.
Finally, estimating the Cash Conversion Cycle requires working with the the major working capital accounts, Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable and Inventory.  The objective of the cash conversion cycle is to understand how quickly the firm converts sales to cash.  By considering these three main working capital accounts, an analyst can first calculate turnover ratios by dividing them into Sales or Cost of Goods Sold whichever is applicable for each account as indicated below:
Operating activities can be further broken up into three subsets of activities:  revenue related activities (i.e., revenue cycle), cost of revenue related activities (i.e., cost of revenue cycle) and the cash conversion cycle. 
Revenue Related Activities
US GAAP has expended many resources on providing guidance for how to recognize revenue when a sale is made.  Generating revenue may be relatively straightforward for a typical retailer such as a Wal-Mart sale, that is either for cash or on account or card.  Revenue for a technology firm, however, is often complicated by the fact that a sale can involve a contract that specifies a bundled set of goods and services that unfold over time.  In this case the sale cannot be viewed as entirely revenue because some of this revenue has yet to be earned.  As a result, part is processed as deferred revenue until earned by performing the services or delivering the good. 
For revenue earned there are two general models that accounting applies.  First, is the merchant model of revenue recognition that allows gross revenue to be recognition.  This is appropriate for a Wal-Mart, who assumes the risk of carrying inventory, return policies etc.,.  It is not appropriate for a “Ticketmaster” type of business model who acts as an agent on behalf of the ultimate service provider.  In this case revenue must reported on a net as opposed to a gross basis and this is referred to as the agent model.  To make matters more confusing, many companies apply a combination of merchant and agent models when recognizing their revenues because each model may be appropriate for a subset of their goods and services.  That is both gross and net revenues are aggregated which require that analysts be alert for any significant changes that slip in for revenue recognition if disclosed.  This is because if a firm shifts from net to gross revenue reporting this can really boost revenue growth numbers!
Accounting for Revenue Related Activities:
Dr Cash or Accounts Receivable
    Cr Revenue
    Cr Deferred Revenue (Current and/or non-current)
Dr Deferred Revenue (non-current)
       Cr Deferred Revenue (current)
Dr Deferred Revenue (current)
       Cr Revenue
An analyst is interested in inferring whether revenue has been primarily driven by the first set of three entries or whether the latter set has played a role.  In addition, if it is the first three entries has credit been relaxed to help maintain revenues?
The second set of transactions is defined from the Cost of Revenue Related Activities:
Dr Cost of Sales and or Cost of Goods Sold
    Cr Inventory or Accounts Payable/Cash
Similarly, under the matching principle additional entries will be recognized such Marketing costs that are associated with selling goods and services.
Finally, estimating the Cash Conversion Cycle requires working with the the major working capital accounts, Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable and Inventory.  The objective of the cash conversion cycle is to understand how quickly the firm converts sales to cash.  By considering these three main working capital accounts, an analyst can first calculate turnover ratios by dividing them into Sales or Cost of Goods Sold whichever is applicable for each account as indicated below:
Accounts receivable turnover = Sales/Accounts Receivables
Inventory turnover = COGS/Inventory
Accounts payable turnover = Purchases/Accounts payable or otherwise COGS/Accounts Payable
Next, by dividing the turnover into days in the year converts a turnover ratio into a number that is easily interpreted.  This numbers answers the questions: 
On average how long does it take to sell inventory, collect accounts or pay accounts?
These are defined as follows if the above Sales and COGS are annual numbers:
Number of days to Collect Accounts Receivable = 365/Accounts receivable turnover
Number of days to Sell Inventory = 365/Inventory turnover
Number of days to Pay Creditors =365/ Accounts payable turnover
Question:  What happens if we are working from a 10-Q and have numbers for 3-months or 6-month accounting periods?
Accounting Stocks and Flows
To answer this question we must first make a careful distinction between “stocks” and “flows” as applied to accounting measurements.  An accounting stock is an account balance that is measured at point in time and represents the closing balance of that account at this point in time.  The fundamental accounting equation represents “permanent or stock accounts” and therefore the balance sheet measures the financial position at a point in time.  Flow variables or “temporary accounts” are measured over an interval of time, referred to as the accounting period.  Sales and COGS are both “flow” variables.  This is why a turnover ratio, defined relative to Sales or COGS, can be converted into an equivalent representation in time.  However, when working with the 10-Q we have to be careful to get time correct.  That is, if working with 6-month Sales and COGS then the divisor is 182.5 and if three months 91.25.  We will return to this in the 1-800-Flowers Example below.
Cash Conversion Cycle
The Cash Conversion cycle is the aggregate number of days for collecting accounts receivable plus the number of days required to sell inventory  minus the days to pay creditors.
Cash Conversion Cycle = Number of Days to Sell Inventory + Number of days to collect accounts receivables – Number of Days to Pay Payables
Combined an analyst armed with revenue cycle information, cost of revenue cycle information and cash conversion cycle suddenly has a powerful set of information to draw conclusions about a company’s performance and management’s current strategy.
Evaluating the strength of a company’s operating activities by “connecting the dots”
A.     Revenue Related Activities
The revenue recognition criteria is quite straightforward for the Flower business model and thus they do not have Deferred Revenues in the liability section of their balance sheet.  The key pair of accounts then, are Sales Revenues and Accounts Receivable.  We expect to see approximately the same rate of growth for each.
Here we will exploit Valuation Tutor’s Data Collector to collect together Sales and Accounts Receivable.
To do this bring up each statement and then double click on the fields you want to gather together:

Then plot the relationship:

 

Observe there has been a sizeable growth in Accounts Receivable relative to the Sales growth.  This is a potential flag.  The picture below provides a quick check for whether this is seasonality or whether some negative trend is developing by checking the current versus the previous quarter:

 

It is clear there is a trend for greater Accounts Receivable growth rates relative to Sales Revenue growth rates.  However, there is one important factor we are currently overlooking and this is the impact of seasonality upon the financials.  Given the current data at hand seasonality cannot be fully analyzed and thus we will return to this issue later in this lesson.
Cost of Revenue Related Activities
In this section we repeat the use of the data collector to depict the Cost of Sales Cycle.  We will use a second Tab View (Tab View 3) in Valuation Tutor so we can preserve the revenue results (in Tab View 2) as depicted above.

Here the cost side is expanding but there is evidence of stretching the Accounts Payable and Inventory relatively more.  The above pattern is in stark contrast to the older pattern where Cost of Sales was relatively much smaller.


 

From visually analyzing the revenue and cost of revenue cycles it would appear that a few negative flags are raised.  On the revenue side the growth rate for accounts receivable far exceeds the growth rate for sales.  This could suggest very loose credit to generate sales.  On the cost side the cost of sales has increased significantly and there is some evidence of both inventory build up as well as delaying paying creditors presumably as a source of liquidity.
These conjectures can be further analyzed by studying the Cash Conversion Cycle.  We turn our attention to this next.
The Cash Conversion Cycle
The three working capital accounts from the latest 10-Q are Accounts Receivable, Inventory and Accounts Payable.  Observe these are important accounts for both the Revenue and Cost of Revenue Cycles.  We can now extract additional information regarding these three important account balances by converting their turnover analysis into average days.


For the case of Sales and COGS the accounting time periods are 3-months and 6-months respectively:
If we work with 6-months as our accounting period then the numerator for converting a turnover into days is 182.5 and if 3-months then 91.25.
Collecting Data Together:
Using the data reported in the two interactive 10-Q’s provided we can pull of the following analysis:
First, to complete the analysis we need the Balance Sheet numbers from December 26, 2010 which was not provided in either of the current 10-Q’s.  Working back with earlier filings we can get this data using the Information Browser in Valuation Tutor from an earlier filing.  It turns out that this prior filing was amended and so it is a Form 10Q/A which indicates amended:

The key numbers here are the Accounts Receivable, Inventory and Accounts Payable plus we will run an additional check to see what the released Sales and COGS were in the amended report versus to what is reported in the current 10Q’s.  These turned out to be different and thus  we will use both sets of numbers below.  The numbers from the Amended 10-Q are highlighted in red:


Cash Conversion Cycle (3-months and 6-months)


The above analysis has controlled for seasonality by working with the December 26, 2010 Balance Sheet Information.  In addition, the Amended columns work with the amended revenue and COGS numbers to compare against the numbers pulled directly from the filings. 
Overall, the evidence from operating activities is mixed for 1-800-Flowers.
Days to turnover inventory and pay payables have increased (and even more with the amended numbers) whereas days to collect receivables have improved.   Overall, the cash conversion cycle is kept tight and currently negative because the days to pay payables have been extended beyond the combined effect of slower sales that results in holding inventory longer, and shorter receivable collection times.
Implications from the Analysis for Business Strategy
From management’s perspective we would expect to see emphasis being placed upon Sales and Marketing given the above numbers have revealed slowing inventory turnover.  In addition Research and Development in relation to technology should also be an important variable for management because a lot of their business is likely to be conducted over the web.  Turning to these numbers from the latest 10Q we observe the following:

That is, Sales and Marketing expenditure has increased along with a marginal increase in Technology and Development.
Conclusions
The above exercise illustrates how you can connect the dots with the firm’s operating decisions.  Other major decisions such as investing activities, financing activities and dividend activities can be subjected to similar close scrutiny.  The overriding purpose is to evaluate management’s strategy and effectiveness when implementing the firm’s business model.  It is also noted that the above analysis has been performed using only the firm’s own financials.  Later parts of Valuation Tutor allow you to take this to the logical next step by comparing across firms and with competitors.

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