Creative Cash Flow Reporting- Uncovering Sustainable Financial Performance Description:

Creative Cash Flow Reporting: Uncovering Sustainable Financial Performance review:
5 stars (Simply the best book on the subject.) - Messers Mulford and Comiskey have released a primer on what has lately become a messy subject. Unlike other books with a focus on cash--Hackel's book, for example--this one delves a little bit deeper into the subject of financial misreporting. The reader is given a synopsis of how companies say that their cash is operating, whereas it ought to be put under financing or investing cash flow. There is a multitude of similarly constructed arguments. The examples are lucid, apropos, and contemporary. The book also has a deterministic model for calculating CFFO. Read it.
5 stars (Mulford's methodology shows why Cash is King) - Over several years of using and preparing the GAAP-based cash flow statement in analysis, I have found it isn't that useful in enabling me to drill down to understand where a company's real operating cash flow comes from. Mulford's methodology does an excellent job focusing on interim period cash flow information to enable the reader to better spot positive and negative trends in an operating company's performance. I found Creative Cash Flow Reporting to be a most useful treatise on what's wrong with the cash flow statement and how to work around its problems. The section on analysis, the cash flow drivers, and the growth cash-flow profile were particularly helpful.
5 stars (Insightful Analysis of the Latest Corporate Shenanigans!) - Creative Cash Flow Reporting by Dr. Charles Mulford is a terrific resource on some of the latest ways that companies may try to pull the wool over the eyes of the investor community. At CFRA, we make our living by analyzing companies which try to obfuscate their true operational health by playing creative accounting games. What we've seen is that after the Enron, WorldCom and other scandals of several years ago, Wall Street analysts and investors more broadly demanded new metrics to evaluate the health of businesses. As a result, more people than ever look to a company's reported cash flows as a sign of how the firm is performing from an operational standpoint. With the increase in investor attention to cash flows, corporate executives have begun to find ways, even within the confines of generally accepted accounting principles, to flatter their cash flow results. In Creative Cash Flow Reporting, Dr. Mulford has compiled the definitive analysis of the creativity in current cash flow reporting, and how analysts should interpret it. We at CFRA are thrilled that Dr. Mulford is a consultant to CFRA and a member of our academic advisory council.



Marc A. Siegel,

Director of Research

Center for Financial Research and Analysis (CFRA)

www.cfraonline.com