ACC 401 - Corporate Financial Accounting: Home

Here are a few tips to for researching:

• The best business information is not free.  However, the library does subscribe to numerous resources.
• When using these databases, adjust your search terms if you're not getting the results you hoped for--try synonyms and scour article titles, abstracts, and subject headings in your search results for likely search terms to use.  Sometimes a thesaurus or encyclopedia come in handy when brainstorming search terms.
• Use double quotes to search multiple words as a phrase (e.g. "new age" finds these terms in exact order).
• Use an asterisk to substitute for letters at the end of a word (e.g. crit* finds critic, criticism, critique, etc.).
• If you can't find what you're looking for, schedule an appointment!

Understanding Quartiles in RMA Industry Norms

Each financial ratio benchmark in RMA Annual Studies has three points (Median Upper, Median, Median Lower) that divide an array of values into four equal groups called quartiles.  So if a company’s value is equal or above the median upper, then it falls into the upper quartile.  If it falls between the median upper and the median, then the company ranks in the upper middle quartile.  This helps you analyze how a company compares to others of similar size.