Workshop on Financial Statement Analysis

A workshop on ‘Financial statement Analysis’ was conducted for the first year BCom students on 9th February 2023. The guest speaker/trainer for the session was Mr. Sarvesh Mopkar. Sarvesh is a Chartered Accountant from the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI) and is a post-graduate in commerce from Pune University. He holds a Diploma in IFRS (ACCA) and also a Diploma in Systems Audit (ICAI).

He has more than 12 years of expertise in the audit sector and has managed audit assignments and financial reporting challenges with a number of India's mid-sized audit consultancy businesses. Since 2018, Sarvesh has focused on teaching finance and developing content for ACCA. He has also given several hours of training for a variety of academic and non-academic courses, including IMS-Pro, Get Through Guides (UK), and International Skills Development Corporation (ISDC). Sarvesh is well known among ACCA students for his innovative approach to teaching the Advanced Financing Management paper, and he frequently speaks at events and programmes sponsored by The Institute Of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI). Sarvesh has the gift of fusing the theoretical and practical parts of finance studies.

The session covered the basic interpretations of a financial statement and the resource person gave insights about profitability, liquidity, gross profit, net profit, ROCE and turnover ratio. Different case studies on real companies were also discussed to understand the practicality of theoretical concepts.As a seasoned financial trainer, Mr. Sarvesh Mopkar began by explaining the fundamentals of accounting, including how to locate an organization's annual report and what makes up financial statements.We gained knowledge about the duties of an auditor and an accountant, the significance of adding notes to accounts, and many other topics.Then, many facets of financial accounting were discussed with us, allowing us to assess the investment potential of various businesses. In addition to a fairly recent case involving Adani Vs. Hindenburg report, we highlighted real-world instances of the importance of recognising the true components of the financial statements. We discovered how the media influences our lives and tricks us into believing that a company is fraudulent simply because we are ignorant of the real criteria by which financial reports should be evaluated. He explained to us how various businesses, including Adanis, had been labeled as fraudulent when, in fact, they had all been the victims of poor decisions made by the boards of directors of the several companies. In the second half of the session we implemented all the theoretical concepts in the real life corporate world. We took a case study on the statement of financial position and statement of profit and loss of Reliance and had an interactive discussion on the accounting ratios of the company.

To conclude, it was an insightful and fun session. We were enlightened by our speaker’s knowledge that he shared with us. It gave us the opportunity to get  the exposure of how actually the corporate world functions and the accounts are maintained by the big MNC’s.