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Analyzing Disclosures

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Submitted By danenberg18
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Analyzing Disclosures
The footnote describing cash, cash equivalents, receivables and inventories for Home Depot for the year ending on January 31, 2010, are all included in the Summary of Significant Accounting Policies. The Summary of Significant Accounting Policies is always the first footnote in financial statements prepared. This footnote is prepared in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) and contains the general policies for recording assets, liabilities, revenues and expenses. When firms wish to include more extensive remarks about these elements of the financial statement, they often add footnotes dedicated specifically to an area, such as inventories, investments, receivables and long term assets. For the year ended January 31, 2010, Home Depot decided to make all their remarks about cash, cash equivalents, receivables and inventory in the first footnotes, making this a many page footnote!
There are no disclosures about cash since this is usually assumed to be bank balances and does not required additional comments. The disclosures about cash equivalents, however, is very brief, this indicates that the liquidity of Home Depots investments are highly liquid. Home Depots maturities will mature within three months or less and is reported with cash ("cash equivalent").
The footnote disclosure about receivables is rather interesting. First, Home Depot is mostly a cash or credit card retailer. They have some contractor house accounts where they extend credit but these are owned by a third-party service provider. In other words, they don't own their own receivables. The footnotes mention that they have evaluated this third-party entity to see if they should be consolidated. This makes me think the third party receivable collection entity is a special purpose entity and not a vendor that factors receivables in the

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