Many hospitals are classified as not-for-profit (NFP). The presentation of for-profit (FP) financial statements differs in several respects from NFP accounting. You will probably work for some NFP hospitals during your career and, therefore, you should understand some of the basic elements of NFP statements. In this assignment you will gather data for an FP and an NFP organization, identify the similarities and differences in data presentation, and report on those differences.
Select one FP and one NFP hospital. You must get your facilitator’s approval for both hospitals. Research the hospitals. Then, download and fill in the template with financial information for the FP hospital, the NFP hospital, and the SMH. You will use this information in subsequent sessions.
It is imperative that you ensure the quality of the data you collect. In the latter part of this assignment, you will carry out a quality control check on the data collected by other students.
Instructions for hospital selection and data gathering:
Use the following Web sites to gather financial data for publicly traded healthcare organizations:
MSN money (homepage). http://money.msn.com/
Investment tools. (n.d.). The Wall Street Journal, SmartMoney. Retrieved March 10, 2009, from http://www.smartmoney.com/tools/
You can obtain financial data for NFP facilities from the following site:
GuideStar http://www2.guidestar.org/
The GuideStar Web site also presents financial data in the format of the IRS Form 990. You should become familiar with this form and learn where to find the income statement, balance sheet, and statement of cash flow.
Besides data for individual companies, the sites have benchmark data for various financial ratios for the hospital industry group. After you have identified the two organizations you will use, you can go directly to the organizations’ Web site and use the investor’s relation tab to acquire the latest financial data.
Your chosen NFP hospitals should have patient revenue between $700 and $1,500 million. You can refer to the annotated IRS Form 990 in the Doc Sharing area for assistance and explanatory notes.
You can visit the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Web site and read instructions for Form 990 and Form 990-EZ. You can also refer to the Form 990 that is available at the Web site. Refer to the links presented in Webliography.
By Thursday, March 7, 2013, submit your assignment to the M1: Assignment 2 Dropbox and to the appropriate Discussion Area.
Use the following file naming convention: LastnameFirstInitial_M1_A2.doc. For example, if your name is John Smith, your document will be named SmithJ_M1_A2.doc.
Through Saturday, March 9, 2013, review and comment on your peers’ responses. As part of your review, carry out a quality control check on the assignments of two classmates. Make sure that groups of assets, liabilities, expenses, and patient revenue are characterized correctly. Conduct analytics to make sure that all data matches (for example, assets = liabilities + equity).