Restating my financial statements for Myer, well what can I say, this has been a journey. I pride myself on being a quick learner and this really took me some time to wrap my head around. Not so much the actual restating of the financials, more the purpose or the equations and calculations it enables you to do to analyse the company.

I was able to follow Maria Tyler’s first video on restating the changes of equity. This put me into a false sense of security, I think. I thought, geez this is easy. I hope the rest are like this. I also started to think actually why are we even doing this?

I found that I tried to read chapter 4 in its entirety and got about halfway before I started to pull my hair out. The acronyms were driving me bonkers, referencing back to Ryman’s figures and lines from their financials were confusing me, so I decided to stop, go back and really analyse Myers statements. Like Martin had asked us to do in Assignment one…..

I took an hour or two to go line by line of the balance statement and research a definition for each term. In conjunction with this, I pulled each footnote and placed it under my definition of the budget line. Right, I thought now I understand line by line what these represent. This really helped me to decipher between operating and financial. Without this step, I would have just wacked in an O and an F wherever and hoped for the best.

I went back to Maria’s video determined that I had this! And I did, however, I got to the crunch time and 3 out of 4 financial years reconciled. I thought hey hang on, how does that happen?!?!?!

Back I went to the start, watched the video again, double-checked my formulas, double-checked my figures correlated to the original balance sheet, double-checked the formulas on the original balance sheet, recalculated the totals (and manually!), checked all the rounding, I had rechecked it all!

I was able to isolate that the issue was in my liabilities section, but where?!

Again, I had another break, this was FRUSTRATING!

Finally, as Martin says, don’t be a lone wolf, I reached out and thought I would check in with Martin, as something was definitely up. Lucky, he came back super quickly, as he does! Turns out, I had data entered a wrong figure from my annual report into my spreadsheet for this year, so of course, it reconciled on the spreadsheet but as I was moving things around and dissecting the balance statement it had picked up this error. I was amazed at how easily this had happened, but equally amazed and how analysing and interrogating the data, even a little, brought this to the forefront!

I decided to reread section 4.3 at this stage, wow this made much more sense to me now, I had done the exercise being discussed and had my own example, which I knew intimately by now. I continued to read through section 4.4 and found because I had been through the restating, I was able to apply all of the equations at the base of the section to my own company. This again helped me digest what Martin was talking about.

So, what have I learnt? This is not a difficult exercise and to be patient and persistent. I have also learnt that I am absolutely an active learner and need to experience things to develop, no more passive learning for me!

If you have gotten this far, thank you and please take a look at my restated financial statements (which I could probably recite for you at this stage). I am eager for any comments or if you see any omissions, as I would hate to be in the same scenario for my ratio’s component!!!!