Guide to Financial Statements: Intro

The Basics
One of the first things you should do if you want to get into the business side of biotechnology is familiarize yourself with financial statements and basic accounting. Luckily, a degree in accounting or finance is not a prerequisite. There are no nested, partial-differential equations or partition functions involved, and in fact, [...]

Guide to Financial Statements: Balance Sheets

Balance Sheets
A balance sheet is comprised of detailed information about a company’s:

Assets: Things a company owns that have value (can be sold or used to make products that can be sold). This includes, manufacturing plants, equipment, inventory, cash and, importantly for biotech, intellectual property in the form of patent and trademarks.
Liabilities: Things a company [...]

Guide to Financial Statements: Income Statements

An income statement (or profit and loss / P&L) is the report that shows you how much revenue (sales) the company earned in a year and also shows the costs related to obtaining that revenue. Basically, the top line of the income statement has value of total sales while the bottom line is the [...]

Guide to Financial Statements: Cash Flows

Overview
Cash flow statements report a company’s inflows and outflows of cash. This is important for obvious reasons. Cash flow statements basically reorder the income and balance sheets to generate a dynamic movie of changes in cash over time. 
The bottom line of the cash flow statement shows the net increase or decrease in cash [...]