The purpose of this chapter is to outline a comprehensive frameworkfor financial statement analysis. Because financial statements provide the most widelyavailable data on public corporations’ economic activities, investors and other stakeholders rely on financial reports to assess the plans and performance of firms and corporate managers.A variety of questions can be addressed by business analysis using financial statements, as shown in the following examples:• A security analyst may be interested in asking: “How well is the firm I am following performing? Did the firm meet my performance expectations? If not, why not?What is the value of the firm’s stock given my assessment of the firm’s current andfuture performance?”•