What is ‘Last Fiscal Year – LFY’
The most recent 12-month accounting period that a business uses when determining its annual financial performance. The SEC requires businesses to list their last fiscal year’s revenue (in addition to other financial figures) in their 10-Q filings.
Analysts and management will often use figures and metrics from a company’s last fiscal year in order to forecast whether or not a business’s current performance will outdo that of the previous fiscal year.
Explaining ‘Last Fiscal Year – LFY’
For example, ABC Corporation’s fiscal year starts and ends in February, and it is currently July. If it were to list its revenue from the last fiscal year, it would show the results that took place from February 1st of the previous year to January 31st of the current year.
However, the inclusion of one-time financial anomalies in the last fiscal year’s results may cause an ineffective comparison, as one-time non-operating events could skew a company’s metrics.
For example, ABC Corporation sold a factory for $1 million and it reported the cash as revenue in the last fiscal year’s financial statements. Unless it is specified that the extra million dollars was not from its regular operations, individuals may mistakenly believe that ABC Corp.’s operations generated an extra million dollars.
Further Reading
- Economic liberalization in China and structural adjustment of Hong Kong manufacturing – s-space.snu.ac.kr [PDF]
- Alternative econometric approaches for analysing the role of the financial sector in economic growth: Time-series evidence from LDCs – www.sciencedirect.com [PDF]
- Manufacturing agglomeration as incentives to Asian FDI in China after WTO – www.sciencedirect.com [PDF]
- LAST IN, LAST OUT'? – books.google.com [PDF]
- Is financial globalization beneficial? – onlinelibrary.wiley.com [PDF]
- Why are buyouts levered? The financial structure of private equity funds – onlinelibrary.wiley.com [PDF]
