Читать книгу Entrepreneurial Finance - Robert D. Hisrich - Страница 52

These types of ratios may be used to analyze the firm's financial ability to meet short-term liabilities. This form of liquidity analysis focuses on the relationship between current assets and current liabilities, as well as the speed with which receivables and inventory can be converted into cash during normal business operations. This class of ratios is particularly important to bankers. Liquidity ratios in general are used extensively to qualify loan applicants for loans. Bankers view both the trend and the point-in-time peer group comparative measurements to be important.

The two most common measurements are the current ratio and the quick ratio. The current ratio is the ratio of current assets to current liabilities:

The quick ratio is the ratio of the quick assets to current liabilities. Quick assets are those assets that can be most readily converted to cash. In most situations, the least liquid of the current assets is inventory; hence, inventory is typically excluded when calculating the quick ratio:

The greater the current ratio and the quick ratio, the higher the company's liquidity and the greater the firm's ability to pay its current liabilities when due. By comparing these ratios using a time-series approach, the entrepreneur can see if the firm has improved its liquidity from one period to the next; increasing ratios demonstrate a positive trend, and lowering ratios indicate declining liquidity. A cross-sectional view of the numbers can indicate if the company is more or less liquid than its peers or how the company ranks against the peer group average.