Horizontal Analysis

Horizontal analysis, also called “trend analysis,” examines changes in a company’s financial reports over time. Valuation Tutor lets you conduct horizontal analysis by letting you merge financial statements and visualize both trends and relative changes.  

For example, the following illustrates result of merging IBM’s income statement  over the last 5 years and plotting the components of Total Revenue:

Visualizing Financial Statements: Column or Pie Charts?

As you know, Valuation Tutor provides different ways to visualize financial statement related information.  Some of these are pie charts, some column charts.  The other day, I was asked if a pie chart could also be rendered as a column chart since the user found column charts to be more intuitive.  This got me thinking that perhaps I should explain how the different types of charts are intended to be used.   Consider the following two charts, both displaying the same data: