Financial reports can often run to hundreds of pages in length, and finding a way around them can often feel like you're trying to find your way out of the maze.

Let's split a financial report down to its component parts and try to make a bit more manageable for you.

So a financial report is a record of an organization's activities and financial position.

It's basically telling you what happened in the last year and often includes what happened two or three years ago as well.

For comparison. The most important and most used parts are the financial statements, and here are the big three, the income statement, the balance sheet, and the cashflow statement.

Other names can be used.

The income statement is often called the profit and loss account, or sometimes statement of operations.

A cashflow statement might be called the statement of cash flows.

The balance sheet sometimes has other names that pop up and it's useful to know what they are.

The statement of financial position is, one, get used to these other names.

As you look at more and more financial statements, there are other financial statements as well.

For instance, the comprehensive statement of equity, however, these are rarely used.

The big three, the income statement, the balance sheet, and the cashflow statement often are what you need to create a really good view of how the company is doing.

Some people like to debate which one or the financial statements is the best, or which is your favorite.

If you could only choose one, which one would you have? The thing about choosing one is it will give you a partial view.

One statement on its own is usually not enough to really see the company brought together.

The three statements can give a really good view of the company's performance.

Financial statements are often in the middle of a financial report, but are usually only a couple of pages long, maybe five or six at most.

So what are the other hundreds of pages doing? First of all, you've got your intro section, everything that comes before the financial statements.

There can be lots of information here and it can run at 25, 50 or even hundreds of pages in itself.

Some of the things that you'll find in the intro section, other the chairperson's letter where they give views on how the company has done the business profile, which tells you what the company does, what it produces, which countries it operates in, what its different products are, and lastly, management, discussion, and analysis.

We're going to find that management discussion and analysis is a goldmine for information, whereas the financial statements are purely factual.

This is what the sales were last year, this is what our costs were last year. This is where our assets were at the end of the year.

Management discussion and analysis helps fill the gaps, such as why sales went up, why costs went up.

Maybe the company had some corporate restructuring and that's why profits have gone down, but they Expect their profits will increase in the future because of the restructuring efforts.

Management discussion and analysis is mostly factual, but there's a bit of color here as well.

A bit of opinion maybe from management.

This means that we have to treat it with a little caution as it might be biased, but it really adds a lot more detail to the three financial statements.

As mentioned, there are other things in the intro section, but the management discussion and analysis is often the most important to us, so that's what comes before the financial statements.

What comes after here, you'll find the footnotes, which give additional information and detail about your financial statements, where your balance sheet might just have a line that says other assets.

Your footnotes might then give you a breakdown of what's included in other assets.

Again, a gold mine of information that's very useful.

We've been talking about the financial statements.

Now let's talk about where to find them.

For most large companies, you could go to their investor relations website.

Here you can see me browsing to the Samsonite investor relations website to look for their latest year end.

When I arrive at the website, I'll have to have a look around, find investor relations, find where their annual reports are kept, and click in there, scrolling down.

I can find the interim report, which is useful for the most up-to-date information, and I can find the annual report, which is often much more detailed.

I can often view it, which will open a website or download it, which will open A PDF.

Having opened a PDF, you can see that it's very long hundreds of pages and has the same structure that we've looked at before, which is intro financial statements, and then footnotes.

It's quite possible that you'll use a data provider to do this instead of the investor relation website.

Felix, which is the data provider that is packaged along with the subscription that you perhaps have, is one such tool, and what you might find is that if you were to search for Samsonite and we go to the right entity, depending on how your data provider is structured, you can find the same information, perhaps just a little easier to access, and you might find that your data provider has other features.

For example, in FactSet, you're able to click into numbers, find source documents, and do auditing.

Every data provider is different, and so you will need to get used to the data providers that will be available to you where you end up.