Shipping Logistics and Accounting Essay

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Revenue vs Income

Revenue is a top line measure, while income is lower down an income sheet. When analyzing a financial statement, revenue is just the money that was earned from sales, but income takes into account the different costs that went into gaining those sales (Boyte-White, 2017). There are actually many different types of income when analyzing financial statements, including gross income, operating income and net income. Net income is the bottom line measure once all the different expenses have been accounted for. So costs are the key differentiator between the two. In theory – and it happens often enough – a company can increase its revenues but lower its income, if costs rise faster than revenues do.

Capital vs. Expense

When considering a company's cost structure, there are two main types of cost. These are capital and expenses. So capital expenditures are outlays for major items that have a long life span, are one-off items, or will be amortized (or depreciated). These expenses include things like the purchase of land or large equipment. An expense is more of a smaller, recurring expenditure in a business. For example, if you buy the land and building you occupy, that is going to be a capital expenditure. If you rent it, then the rent is an expense.

Another view of the difference is that a capital expenditure is when the company has to finance something (Investopedia, 2015). This view essentially equates major purchases with financing, though the reality is a little bit more complex than that because a company can use financing to operating expenses. That is actually quite common for early-stage companies. Thus, financing might not be the best way to differentiate between these two concepts, but rather the best way is really whether the item is large, non-recurring, and especially if it will be subject to amortization or depreciation, then it will be a capital expenditure.

Income Statement vs. Balance Sheet

Probably the two most important types of financial statement are the income statement and the balance sheet. Both are used to help evaluate the financial health of a company, but they are quite different in the information they convey. The first and most obvious difference is the time element. An income statement covers a specific period of time, such as a quarter or year. The balance sheet is, in contrast, just a snapshot of a moment in time, such as the last day of a quarter or a year.

Beyond that, these two statements convey very much different information about the company's finances. The income statement covers a period of time, and is entirely concerned with that time period. It is the record of the revenue, expenses, and income for the company over that particular period of time (Scilly, 2017). The income statement starts with the revenue, then drills down to the various categories of expense. After the last expenses, usually interest expense and tax expense, the company will have its net income.

The balance sheet conveys something else entirely. The balance sheet conveys the financial health of the company. It is at a moment in time, the end of each quarter, but more than that the balance sheet is cumulative. An income statement starts fresh each quarter, but the balance sheet does not – it carries over.

The balance sheet shows the assets on one side, and the liabilities and equity on the other.

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The concept of the balance sheet is that in accounting, every transaction balances, so whatever the organization is worth in terms of its assets is spoken for, either through debt or equity. In essence, the value of the equity is the value of the assets less the value of the liabilities.

The balance sheet is a great tool for determining the overall health of the company, and can be used to examine the overall liquidity and solvency of the company in particular. Accountants often use balance sheet measures to analyze a company, because they are current and cumulative. By contrast, an income statement can show that last quarter was terrible, but the next quarter is great – it tells less about the company.

So for business leaders, the two statements convey entirely different things. A business leader will appreciate the income statement for giving a pulse on how the company has been performing lately, but the balance sheet is a more accurate of the overall financial health of the company. So a business leader can use income statement information to set tactics that will cut expenses, or increase revenue. But the same leader will want to use balance sheet information to make decisions about expansions, financing and that sort of thing.

Transportation Company

Any publicly traded company will have its financial statements published as part of this annual report. They can be examined online. So for example, the FedEx 2017 Annual Report will have these statements contained within. It can be downloaded here:

http://s1.q4cdn.com/714383399/files/oar/2017/AnnualReport2017/AnnualReport2017flat/docs/FedEx_2017_Annual_Report.pdf

The income statement can be found on page 49 and the balance sheet on page 48.

Intermodal Transportation

Intermodal transportation is the movement of a good via multiple different types of transportation. This will typically be done using a shipping container. An example would be a good is produced in Shenzhen, packed into a container, trucked to port, shipped to Los Angeles on a freighter. There, is might be unloaded, put onto a train, sent to Chicago, and then offloaded. At that point, it might be placed on a truck, and sent to a warehouse in Minnesota. On that journey, three different modes of transport were used to get the good from the manufacturing facility to the buyer. The use of different modes is the defining characteristic of intermodal transportation. Bektas and Crainic (2007) use the chain analogy, where different modes are different links in the chain that spans from starting point to endpoint.

The definition of intermodal transportation should therefore be any transportation that uses more than one mode. A more refined definition specific to logistics would be that goods are loaded into a container. The container facilitates intermodal transportation. But basically, the term intermodal transportation pertains specifically to logistics, and is not commonly used in other fields.

The container is the key element in intermodal transportation. The container is the packaging that is used for a wide range of goods. The container can hold a lot of different things, dry goods usually. Whatever is packed into the container, the key is that the container is a standardized unit, and the different modes are designed to carry this standardized unit. A freighter might carry hundreds, a truck just one, but each will be designed to carry containers, rather than….....

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