Using the Internet, access the SEC 10-K annual report for a publically traded company of your choice. The company must have inventory and accounts receivable (it cannot be Wal-Mart or a service company). Review the company's MD&A as well as the financial statements and the accompanying footnotes. Use this information to prepare your "analytical" results. You may wish to seek additional background and comparative data on the business. Yahoo Finance has a "competitors" feature we will discuss in class.

Your final paper should briefly describe your assessment of the firm's activities and plans for the future. The content of your paper should focus on accounting issues and include words used in our accounting class, including financial accounting as well as managerial accounting. An example would be a discussion on inventory: how is it valued, is there a WIP account, and other details you learned this semester.

You are also to access "news" about the company. Again you can find this at Yahoo Finance and we will discuss this in class. As you are required to use sources other than the textbook, including but not limited to Web sites, you must cite all your sources in a bibliography and use proper footnote techniques. Refer to the Online Guide to Writing and Research at http://www.umuc.edu/prog/ugp/ewp_writingcenter/writinggde/ for documentation requirements.

This paper is your opportunity to present your understanding of the financial and managerial accounting concepts covered in this course. Interpreting data is useful to managers. All too often managers are overwhelmed with too many facts and figures. What they need are insightful employees who can interpret this data in a meaningful fashion. One good way to show this is to "present" the financial information, explaining what the various financial statements "show" in words. Questions on this project should be addressed during class so we, as a group, can learn from each other.

In this chapter we discuss the disclosure, consistency, and conservatism principles as applied to the valuation of the various inventory accounts on the financial statements.

For extra credit, students may complete some financial statement research for a public company relating the above principles to the example company. Students should include a write up of information which details specific applicable concepts discussed from chapter 6 with the public company they find. Students should NOT just submit the financial statements and footnotes but MUST include their thoughts and application of the chapter concepts with the information found for the inventory accounts and concepts.

Students must submit with their write-up the financial statements and footnote disclosures of the public company. Students should also cite where they found their sources. There is no length requirement for th extra credit as the assignment is based off of quality of connections described in the extra credit write-up.

Students can search for public company's financial statement information either on the company's website or on the SEC website through: www.sec.gov.