Financial Disclosures

Financial disclosures are necessary notes listed within financial statements. The publicly held company used in this report to analyze a financial statement disclosure is Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart is one of the largest retail stores around the world. They supply customers with many products. Wal-Mart provides products such as groceries, baked goods, clothing, jewelry, and many other needs for their consumers. In this paper it will analyze the disclosures contain within the notes to the financial statement that are related to cash and cash equivalent, receivables, and inventory.

Wal-Mart is the leader in the retail industry. The first Wal-Mart store was opened in 1962 in Rogers, Arkansas, founded by Sam Walton. Wal-Mart is committed to providing low prices and saving their customers money. Wal-Mart is a competitive retail industry. Wal-Mart stores employs approximately 2.2 million associates worldwide, it serves 200 million customers, has 10,700 stores within 27 countries, ad with sales reaching as high as 466 billion (Wal-Mart.com).

A business generates cash from sales of products and services, sales of assets, borrowing from banks and other creditors and from capital contributions by its owners. There are important factors to consider when analyzing a company’s financial statement they include cash and cash equivalent, receivables, and inventories. How well a company manages these factors shows how well the business is doing.

Financial statements help investors and creditors to predict future cash flows. The company’s balance sheet and the disclosure help to provide relevant and useful information. Cash and cash equivalent is an asset that appears on the statement of financial position of a business and includes currency held by the business. Cash and cash equivalent is money available on demand at a financial institute and are short-term highly liquid investments (Kieso, 2007). Cash and cash equivalent helps investors determine how stable