An accountant's job rarely stops with the preparation of a company's financial statements and tax return. These documents are required, but they often don't provide enough information to reach a reasonable conclusion about a company's health. Additional analysis of the numbers that support these documents can offer valuable information to all kinds of customers, including your boss, the company's management, and potential investors.

If you're a public accountant, you're often asked to give an opinion on the health of a company. The financial statements are a good starting point. You can take the numbers from these statements and perform ratio analysis. You can then compare these ratios with those from prior years, from other companies in the same industry, and from competitors. If the profit ratio is not what the client expected, you can help them narrow down the problem by analyzing profit by product or by customer.

If you see a ratio that appears to be out of line, you can do some detailed analysis of the numbers in the accounts used to calculate that ratio. For example, if your inventory turnover ratio seems low compared to the industry average, you could analyze your company's inventory by product. You may find that you are overstocked on one particular product and recommend changing your company's product manufacturing priorities to focus on other products with higher turnover rates. Your extra analysis potentially just reduced costs and increased sales.

The following information and tools can help you jump-start your financial analysis.

• Turn numbers into conclusions (Article)
  Learn how to use financial statement numbers to determine company health.
  
• Ratio analysis (Template)
  Use this Excel 2003 template to analyze different categories of ratios and determine a company's overall health.
  
• Customer profitability analysis (Template)
  Identify which customers are the most profitable using this Excel 2003 customer profitability worksheet.
  
• Product profitability analysis (Template)
  This Excel 2003 template can help you pinpoint which products are the most profitable and which are not performing as well.
  
• Inventory/cost of goods sold analysis (Template)
  Use this Excel 2003 template to evaluate a company's products by inventory unit, cost of goods sold, inventory costing, and an ending inventory breakdown.