Income Statement Quotes

Inside an organization there are only cost centers. The only profit center is a customer whose check has not bounced.

Accounting is the language of business.

You have to know accounting. It's the language of practical business life. It was a very useful thing to deliver to civilization. I've heard it came to civilization through Venice which of course was once the great commercial power in the Mediterranean. However, double entry bookkeeping was a hell of an invention.

The most important word in the world of money is cash flow. The second most important word is leverage.

American capitalists, enthralled by the doctrines of finance, have put their income statements in service of the balance sheet.

Basically, financial reporting is this sinking hole at the centre of journalism. You start by swimming around it until finally, reluctantly, you can't fight the pull anymore and you get sucked down the drain into the biz pages.

Balance sheets bore me. I suspect if figures had excited me I would have gone into the city and now be a lot wealthier.

There are no accounting issues, no trading issues, no reserve issues, no previously unknown problem issues.

When I got my statement in January, I was worth $2.2 billion. Then I got another statement in August that said I was worth $3.2 billion. So I figure it's only nine months' earnings, who cares?

For there to be an expense, there must be income somewhere else

There are more ways than one to measure profits and losses.

Learning how to keep track of inventory and cash flow and creating an income statement and a balance sheet are great skills to learn for managing existing businesses.

You will learn more about Donald Trump by going down to the federal elections, where I filed a 104-page essentially financial statement of sorts, the forms that they have. It shows income - in fact, the income - I just looked today - the income is filed at $694 million for this past year, $694 million. If you would have told me I was going to make that 15 or 20 years ago, I would have been very surprised.

When I take a look at a company's annual report, if I don't understand it, they don't want me to understand it.

Ratings translate into corporations, corporations that need a profit statement this quarter that's larger than the last.

In 1992, we did $1.1 billion in revenues. In the first nine months of 1993, we did just under $1.2 billion.

The bottom line is down where it belongs – at the bottom. Far above it in importance are the infinite number of events that produce the profit or loss.