FINANCIAL RATIOS AS AN AID TO MANAGEMENT DECISION MAKING

CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.1    Background of the Study
Planning is one of the most important aspects in the management o a firm. It involves an appraisal of the past performance of the firm and a projection into the future. It is also related to existing strengths and weaknesses of the firm. The strength must be understood if they are to be used for proper advantage and the weaknesses must be recognized if corrective action is to be taken. It is necessary for instance, to find whether inventories are adequate to support the projected level of sales or whether the existing level of investment in account receivable is an indication that the firm has lax collection policy. Ratios analysis employs basic financial data taken from the analysis of financial statement (balance sheet and income statement which is the primary financial) reporting mechanism of an entity, both internally, and externally.
An analysis of the financial information communicated by the statement should include the computation and interpretation of financial ratios. Although emphasis is focused on outside users, such as credit and owners, management is aware, that their performance will be reviewed by those external partial and for other reason. For instance, the basic financial statement are used to access the effectiveness of management in planning and controlling operations as well as for decision making. Management also recognizes that the evaluation of past operation, as revealed by the analysis of the basic statement, represent a good starting pointing planning future operations and serves as important means of assessing past performance and in forecasting and planning future performance. In other words, the aim of this term paper is to evaluate financial ratios as an aid to management decision – making, to find out if any, how financial ratios helps management in decision – making, to determine if accounting is actually of any use to management, to find the importance of financial ratios, to examine the extent to which management uses financial ratios information supplied to identify the problems inherent in the use of management information.   
1.2       Statement of the Problem
Financial ratio analysis is important to the management, owners, personnel, customers, suppliers, competitors, regulatory agencies, tax payers and lenders each having their views in applying financial statement analysis in their evaluations and making judgments about the financial health of organization. Many financial organizations also compare their own ratio values to those for similar organizations looking for differences that could indicate weaknesses or opportunities for improvement (Vincent , 2013). However,