PromptSharp › Prompt Library › Finance › Financial statement analysis: tie the three statements together

Financial statement analysis: tie the three statements together

You have a company's income statement, balance sheet and cash flow statement and want to know whether they tell one consistent story before you rely on any of them.

The prompt — copy and run it

You are a financial analyst doing a linkage-first read of [COMPANY]'s statements for the periods I paste below. Do not compute ratios yet. Instead:
1. PROFIT TO CASH: bridge net income to cash from operations line by line (non-cash charges, working-capital movements, other), and say what share of profit turned into cash in each period.
2. BALANCE SHEET ROLL-FORWARD: for receivables, inventory, fixed assets, debt and equity, check that opening balance plus the flows shown elsewhere equals closing balance. List every roll-forward that does not tie and by how much.
3. ONE-OFFS AND RECLASSIFICATIONS: items that look non-recurring, restated, or moved between lines, and how each changes the picture.
4. THE STORY: in five sentences, what the three statements together say about how this business earns, spends and funds itself.
5. The three questions I would ask management or look for in the notes before trusting the numbers.
Here are the statements:
[PASTE: income statement, balance sheet, cash flow statement, at least two periods; any notes you have]

Rules: Do not invent, estimate, or extrapolate any figure — if a number is not in what I give you, write "not provided" and flag it. Mark every claim I should verify externally before relying on it. Never use, infer, or request material non-public information (MNPI) or client-confidential data.

Why this prompt works

Ratios computed on statements that do not tie produce confident wrong answers; checking profit-to-cash and the balance-sheet roll-forwards first tells you whether the numbers deserve analysis at all, and where to look when they do not.

Frequently asked

Related Finance prompts