The field of finance and accounting is essential in today's economy, as it deals with managing financial resources, recording transactions, and analyzing financial data. However, understanding financial statements and their components can be challenging, particularly for those who are new to this field. A good way to improve understanding is through visualization, which can help simplify complex financial concepts and make them more accessible to beginners.
The project aims to provide an interactive visualization of the makeup of assets, liabilities, and equities across different industries, which can help users understand financial statements and their components. Beginners may struggle to comprehend the interplay between assets, liabilities, and equities and how they affect a company's financial position. This project seeks to solve this problem by providing an interactive visualization of financial data that can help beginners understand the makeup of assets, liabilities, and equities across different industries.Having a basic understanding of finance and accounting is crucial in today's economy. Individuals who are new to the field need a way to learn about financial statements and their components in an accessible manner. This project provides an interactive and visual way for beginners to learn about financial statements.
The project's use case is a beginner in an intro accounting class who wants to understand financial statements better. In this scenario, the student would use the visualization tool to highlight different balance sheet values across companies. As these different asset, liability, and equity types are parts of a whole, it would be useful to visualize the percentages they take up. Further, the student would be able to delve deeper into a specific company, with time series information showing up beside the breakdown visualization. Here, a user will be able to understand the statements across firms and the sector as a whole.
Company data was queried directly from the Compustat Annual database through the Wharton Research Data Services (WRDS). WRDS is a well-known data provider of business-related data run by the University of Pennsylvania. Although WRDS requires an account to query from their databases, Northeastern students are easily able to apply for an account that is sponsored by the university. The dataset that resulted from our query on WRDS is here. There are no bias or ethical considerations present in annual financial reports. These reports go through both internal and independent external auditors with all values checked over many times. With this, all values are guaranteed to be true. However, while annual reports do not reflect false information about the company, we should always read them with a sense of skepticism as companies always want to portray themselves in the best light. The original dataset contained annual balance sheet information across a range of 13 years for Apple, Verizon, Coca-Cola, Target, Exxon Mobile, Intel, IBM, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, 3M, Pfizer, Stryker, Union Pacific, Microsoft, Accenture, and Netflix from January 2010 to January 2022. After extracting the data from the database, we noticed there were several columns full of missing values.
Explore cross-sectional balance sheet breakdowns. Functionality includes selecting a year of interest and filtering by tickers.
Click on a certain company's breakdown for more time-series information on the firm. Hover over different areas for tooltip information.
Explore movement of different proportions of a firm's financial information. Functionality includes filtering by assets, liabilities, or stockholders' equity. Hover over different sections for tooltip information.