2020년 8월 24일 오후 11:06 (GMT+9)
Kathleen Chaykowski : Covered finance and business at Forbes and The Wall Street Journal. BA, Stanford University.
What is a Balance Sheet? - 2020 - Robinhood
DEFINITION:
A balance sheet is an important financial statement made by a company, providing a snapshot of its financial situation, including its assets, liabilities, and shareholders’ equity.
Think balanced scale. A balance sheet is a financial equation that’s like a scale perfectly balanced at any point in time. It’s one of the most widely cited financial statements, and shows the value of a company’s total assets (what it owns) as equal to the sum of its liabilities (what it owes, like long-term debt, bills due, etc.) and shareholders’ equity (which is like the “net worth” of shareholders of the company assuming their net worth were tied solely to the particular company being considered). Analysts and investors use the balance sheet to learn more about which funding sources a company uses to support its growth and operations.
EXAMPLE
Let’s look at a real-world example, the balance sheet of Apple for the fiscal year ending on September 29, 2018: $366B (assets) = $259B (liabilities) + $107B (shareholders’ equity). Apple’s assets include things like its fancy headquarters building in California, its valuable patents, and its huge piles of cash. Its liabilities include monies it owes others. And its shareholders’ equity is the difference between the two.
A balance sheet is like taking a financial portrait of a company with a polaroid camera...
It’s a snapshot, taken at one point in time, that helps capture a company’s health by showing the value of its assets (how much a company owns), liabilities (how much a company owes), and shareholders’ equity (what shareholders’ would theoretically get paid for the shares if the company closed, paid its debts, or sold its assets). In this bread-and-butter financial statement, assets are always equal the sum of liabilities and shareholders’ equity.
