Chapter 24

Ten Top-Notch Online Resources

In This Chapter

Finding financial reports

Looking for analysis and advice

Keeping up-to-date on investing and business news

The Internet has made accessing financial reports – and getting to the bottom of the numbers – easier than ever. You can instantaneously find a wealth of financial report information (often for free!) on the Web. Here are ten of our favourite sites.

Companies House

If you go to Companies House (www.companieshouse.gov.uk) you can find financial reports and other details of companies. By entering the company’s name or registration number you can access a certain amount of free information, such as the company’s registered office (where documents can be served) and the nature of its business.

Companies House also tells you the date of the last annual return and the latest year for which accounts have been filed. The due date for the next filing of annual return and accounts will also be shown. If you wish to access information about the company’s members, directors, or the financial statements themselves then this has to be paid for – the annual return and the accounts can be obtained online for the princely sum of £1 each.

Remember that companies which obey the legal definition of a small company are entitled to file abbreviated accounts which contain very little information. The page containing the free information will tell you if the accounts are abbreviated by saying ‘Total exemption small’ after the date of the last accounts.

IASB

The International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) develops the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) that govern financial report presentation and contents. You can access the current rules and read about new rules under consideration at IASB’s Web site, www.iasb.org. The IASB’s magazine Update can be accessed free online and this tells you about the progress being made on current projects. Unfortunately, the accounting standards themselves are only available on payment of a fee.

In Chapter 18 we talk more about the role of IASB and how it develops the GAAP rules.

UK listed companies must follow International standards in the preparation of their group accounts. Other UK companies follow the standards of the UK Accounting Standards Board. Their Web site can be accessed via www.frc.org.uk – the Web site of the Financial Reporting Council. The FRC Web site can also be used to access reports of the Financial Reporting Review Panel and the Web site of the Auditing Practices Board.

Yahoo! Finance UK

Although Yahoo! Finance (uk.finance.yahoo.com) may not be the most sophisticated financial Web site, it excels as one of the easiest sites to use for accessing basic financial statistics for all companies that are publicly traded. All you need to know is the company’s stock symbol to access the information for free, and if you don’t know the symbol, you can search by the company name.

After you access the main page for a company, you find its current trading statistics and any news headlines of articles that mention the company. On the left-hand side of the page, you find links for historical prices, basic charts, technical analysis, message boards discussing the company, a company profile, information on director dealings in the shares, analyst opinions and estimates, and broker reports (some you don’t have to pay for, but others send you to Web sites of companies that do charge for the reports). You can also link through the annual reports button to the company’s latest annual report.

Standard & Poor’s

When you hear the initials S&P (Standard & Poor’s), you probably think of the S&P 500, which is a select group of US large-capitalisation stocks (stocks for companies that have a market value greater than $10 billion) whose prices are monitored daily and used as one gauge of how well the US stock market is doing. However, S&P’s primary financial role is rating the credit worthiness of a company’s bonds that are offered for sale.

You can access credit ratings for each company and industry statistics at S&P’s Web site (www2.standardandpoors.com).You can also find recent press reports of any changes to a company’s credit rating for free after you register on the site (registration is also free). You can search for press reports by company and by industry, but you can’t access full S&P reports for free.

You can find some S&P information, charged for on their site, at no charge at Business Week’s investing Web site (www.businessweek.com/investor/), after you click through to Europe.

Biz/ed

Biz/ed says that it is a Web site for students and educators in business studies, economics, accounting, leisure, sport, recreation and travel and tourism. Our interest in it is that it provides online training in a wide range of accounting topics. Go to www.bized.co.uk. In the Quick Jump box at the top left-hand corner of the home page, select ‘Accounting’ from the drop down menu where it says ‘Choose subject’ and click ‘Go to Resources’. This will take you to a wealth of useful learning material.

In particular, clicking on ‘Financial Accounting’ and then ‘Financial Ratio Analysis’ leads you to explanations and worked illustrations of many of the ratios discussed in this book. Some industry ratios are also available.

Financial Times

The Financial Times is the UK’s premier business newspaper. You can find it on the Internet at www.ft.com/home/uk. The Web site includes recent articles from the paper updated for the Web site. Using the navigation menu on the left-hand side you can look at an archive of articles on everything from markets to companies to personal finance. On the Web site ft.ar.wilink.com you can get easy access to company annual reports. Most are available to be downloaded, or they can be sent to you by post if you want to feel the glossiness – or absence of glossiness – of the actual report.

Accounting Web: ICC

ICC have provided industry ratios for many years. Originally, they published an annual volume giving industry averages for many of the key accounting ratios. Now, the information is available online via www.accountingweb.co.uk/icc. A lot of the basic information is also available from Companies House (see the first section of this chapter), but ICC also provide packages of data such as five years accounts. Obviously, this sort of information is not available free of charge. As part of their ‘Overview report’ (cost £14) they provide a company and industry comparison which is a ratio and percentage based table of company performance against industry sector. This information includes industry quartiles for business ratios.

Find

As well as links into investor information on companies and click-throughs to other providers of specialist information, www.find.co.uk also provides a pretty comprehensive personal finance service including background information as well as specific product profiles. For example if you click through to pensions you can get everything you need from a beginner’s guide to understanding the risks and returns of pensions.

Be careful, most of the sites that Find connects to are the sites of companies selling products, but it’s a good source if you are educating yourself in personal finance or, for example, thinking of choosing companies to put into your own pension scheme.

Department of Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform

Formerly the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), the Department of Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform’s site (www.berr.gov.uk) offers a range of interesting business-related topics. For example, the link to the Business Link Web site gives practical advice on what to do if you are planning on setting up in business yourself.

The main interest in this Web site for readers of this book is the informa- tion provided about the implementation of the new Companies Act via the ‘Better Business Framework’ tab. If, on the other hand, you want copies of legislation then the relevant Web site is the Office of Public Sector Information at www.opsi.gov.uk where all recent UK legislation can be downloaded without charge.

Reuters

You can access current business news for free at Reuters’ Web site (www.reuters.co.uk). Reuters offers sector and industry analysis, as well as a number of good tools for stock investors. You can also access company and research reports from many brokerage companies. Some of these reports are free, and others require payment.