in any one period's report than the trend. Are profits getting better? Is the balance sheet fatter? That's because the share value does not have a simple relationship to either the balance sheet or the income statement. The value of a business is based on what someone would pay for it to gain control of the money it will make in the future. The balance sheet gives this potential buyer an idea of how easily the company can finance future growth and weather financial crises; the income statement gives the buyer an idea how much future profits might be. But an investor would need to know a lot of other things before coming to a decision about how much to pay.For people running the company, the financial statements are just a starting point. The really interesting numbers may not show up on a statement, such as the profit margins on various products, projected sales, or order backlogs. The financial statements pull all these things together, but any analysis of how a company is doing needs a different kind of operational data. The best employee ownership companies share these numbers too. Now, having reviewed almost all the issues related with the balance sheet, we can say in my opinion that sine its appearance a few centuries ago it has been an important and outstanding financial statement summarizing the financial position of an enterprise at a particular point in time. In the quickly developing technological environemt it might change its form, it might even change some of its principles, it will be viewed along with more and more information in the era of information, but it will keep for some more time its "position of such a great importance"....
