In: Finance
How do you standardize income statements? In other words, how do you compute a common-size account item in the Income Statement? Give an example.
Standardization of the income statement will be helping in making the income statement more efficient and comparable as to other companies and it will be also helping in order to determine whether the company is more efficient than other companies in the same group or not so the income statement common sizing is an important way in order to compare the income statement of a company to other companies by different analysts.
Common sizing of income statement will be done by dividing each line item by topline or sales and then they will be expressing them in the form of percentage. There are various important ratios which are derived by the analyst as a percentage of sales and they could be gross margin on net margin or operating margin and they could be helpful in order to compare the performance of an entity in respect to other entity in the same industry and derived at whether the company is outperforming its peers or underperforming it's peers.
For example, we will be trying to express the percentage of gross profit in respect to sales and we will be deriving the gross profit margin and we will be trying to compare that gross profit margin across the industry segment in order to derive whether the company is attracting a better profit in respect to the industry or not.