PLYRS 3

wrong.

you can have sales, but they may not have materialized in cash receipts yet.

as my finance prof used to say, "it's always better to be cash poor than business poor."

MrClean

I

JonasM

Case in point: my company just closed the entire Cleveland facility, moved the production area to their headquarters, layed off the entire place except for us developers, who now work from home. (one good thing came out of this).

The new production area has been working at a throughput of something like 10% of the work we did, partly because they have only installed 30% of the PCs that we had, with the remaining portion due to the fact that they are still learning the business, and because of the bungled handover, a number of very large customers got upset and took their business elsewhere. However, the company posted numbers that said that the second quarter was a record quarter. How? By counting work that was done here in Cleveland, but only delivered after the changeover, and a big accounting writeoff that you supposedly can take when closing a facility. It's all numbers. I can't wait to see their 3rd quarter numbers, and how they fudge them this time. By monitoring their database, we can see they they rarely are running more than 10-15 PCs, where we kept 100+ humming. Any profit numbers they publish are pure fiction (though possibly legal fiction due to weird accounting rules).

JonasM

SanMarinoCpe

So now the question is if you were to invest into a company what would you use to make that decision? Since the accounting can be manipulated to show situations that do not exist, you really cant use that.

Scott Evil

then why are you asking questions that even marketing people know?

Scott Evil

I consider it an order until cash is in hand. That makes it a sale. i.e. the little SALE flag that would pop-up on the cash register. Keep it simple stupid.

Scott Evil

I invest on what I believe is going to happen in the future. Most financial statements are measures of past performance and are not always indicative of what fture performance will be.

For example, Google is like $350/share. Highly over valued, but that is not my point. I am relatively comfortable that $370 is a possibility given their business strategy. I just made $20/share. This takes a lot of research on the company, not just financials.

Now, Ford is $8.50/share. That is a good buy, but until I know what their 197th turn around plan actually involves, I am not really interested.

Or you can listen to a broker.

PLYRS 3

LOL

you're the idiot if you think keeping it simple will answer the question.



btw, do you think FORD uses cash registers?

PLYRS 3

in your "simplified" thinking, you failed to answer the question....

Scott Evil

ok Mr. Smarty-pants, Ford records vehicle sales on its books when the cars are shipped. The dealer has paid for them at that point too. In Ford's eyes, that is a sale. They will record it as a cash inflow. There is your cash register--if that helps you understand it. If you really want to get very techinical, we can talk about the provisions that they are recording at the same time for hold-back, incentives, buy-back provisions, dealer covenant issues, volume discounts, etc. I am not saying that stuff is not important, but the key thing is: Are the focking cars being shipped to dealers as they are made or sitting in a parking lot because nobody wants them? Pretty Simple.

Maybe I am an idiot for keeping a simplified view-point, but it sure beats the BS that gets pumped out into the media. The basics are where the focus should be.

Maybe things work a little differently in Canada, either that or you got C's and D's in accounting and failed finance altogether.