Firm Financials

[Arcnor]

Currently the player can observe the income statement of a firm location but not the balance sheet. Having access to a balance sheet at the firm level could help the player identify various factors that influence company wide ratios (ie inventory amount, return on assets, etc). A balance sheet would also provide very useful information when making firm purchase decisions.

This should be fairly easy to implement with the balance sheet including inventory amount, land / building value and then perhaps a % of any cash or loan amount.

[counting]

Interesting proposal.

But it isn't that easy in accounting perspective. If every firm is treated as a separate subsidiary, what would you do with equity? divided equality amount all firm? I am fairly certain it won't "balance" assets and liabilities with simple division of shares, cash, and loans. (If you just equality split the sheet, it's just as useful as the whole corporate balance sheet)

[Arcnor]

Yes just splitting it based off a % wouldn't result in a "balanced" balance sheet. That suggest was more for simplicity for implementation.

The only way I see it truly working as it should for accounting purposes is if you could track how much cash was used by the firm, set an amount of cash for the firm to start with, and then track if any of the cash was from a loan. That is perhaps too tall a task to implement at the firm level.

Perhaps a better suggestion would be to have some sort of pro forma data available for viewing. This could include inventory levels, total assets(non cash), and then various ratios that provide further details.

My ultimate wish list would be to have access to a company wide Cash Flow statement. The game runs off the cash accounting method and so ultimately cash flow is the name of the game.

[counting]

I agree that a cash flow statement will be immensely helpful, and I always though it definitely should be implemented already.

As for "firm level" inventory and stock statements, as well as floating and fixed assets details, I think they could work, and can serve the management purpose well. We don't actually need detailed firm "balanced" balance sheet, unless we are trying to implement some sort of manual subsidiaries separation mechanism (which might be quite cool BTW )