I don’t know why we like interpreting a firm’s financial health using an income statement. I think it would be objective to critically analyse the cashflow statement. Intact if you want to invest in a company, I’ll recommend one to analyse the cashflow statements over the last 5 years together with the firms cash budget for the current year. What a firm spends its cash on has a greater bearing on its financial health and success.
As such, without scrutinizing a firm’s cash flows, it might not be easy to foretell its future. The income statement is often times as result of subjective considerations hence may be misleading. Similarly, closing balances in the balance sheet are often open to manipulations.
If you manipulate the cashflow statement, how then do you reconcile the cash/cash equivalents at the beginning and the end of an accounting period. You my friend appears not to understand how a cashflow statement is analysed. Give me a cooked cashflow statement together with other financial statements and I’ll surely point out the exact portions that have been manipulated.