Your assignment will require the comparison and analysis of their last two published annual reports.

WESTPAC BANKING CORPORTION

You will therefore need to obtain copies of their two most recently published annual reports. Depending on when your chosen company publishes their reports, these may be the reports for 2017-18 and 2018-19, 2018 and 2019, or 2018-19 and 2019-20. These two reports must be from two consecutive years

Your analysis will be presented in report format. You will need to use a spreadsheet program (Microsoft Excel)

Requirement one – preparation in a spreadsheet program

Once you have obtained the two annual reports, transfer their income statement, balance sheet, statement of changes in equity and statement of cash flows into a spreadsheet. 

1a) Prepare a spreadsheet with these financial statements. Ensure that the statements are formatted in a professional and attractive manner. 

1b) Use formulas in your spreadsheet to verify that the totals shown in the financial statements have been correctly calculated.

2) Once you have transferred the financial statements and into a spreadsheet, you will then prepare a report (using Microsoft Word, LibreOffice Writer, or a similar word processing program) which analyses some aspects of these reports. Your report must be formatted in a professional and attractive manner. Further, your report must follow the conventions of report formatting.

2a) Provide the reader with an introduction to the company you are analysing. This introduction should provide the reader with a basic understanding of what they do, which industry they operate in, company information and when their financial statements are prepared. As a minimum, we are looking for you to tell the reader the industry the company is in, when it was formed, what their structure is, what its market capitalisation is and who their auditors are

2b) Identify both the time period for which the reports refer and when the reports were published.

2c) Identify the figures provided in the older of the two reports (e.g. if you downloaded FY2018 and FY2019’s annual reports, the older of the two reports would be FY2018). These figures will also be stated in the newer report, so that you can compare the results between the most recent and the second most recent year4. Compare the figures as stated in both reports. Are they the same? If not, you must identify the differences. If there are differences, provide reasons for why they have been changed. In a spreadsheet, you should compare the two sets of figures by subtracting one column’s figures from the other to demonstrate the ‘differences’.

2d) Provide a reconciliation note for your company’s most recent retained earnings account balance (if a business does not have a history of profits, they may report ‘retained losses’ or ‘accumulated losses’ instead). This information can be found and extracted from the statement of changes in equity. The purpose of this note is to explain what the balance of the retained earnings account was at the start of the period and what caused it to move up or down, thus demonstrating how it got to the ending balance. Your analysis should provide both the reconciliation note, as well as a written explanation of the note.