How to Calendarize Financials

Hi, I'm Wayne Blanchard. I'm a certified financial planner and a member of the Garrett Planning Network. Our question is, what does it mean and how do you work with how to uh calendarize financials? Well, that sounds kind of complicated, but it really doesn't mean a lot. uh what what you have is companies work on different fiscal years. Now think of this most people you and I in general work on what we would call a calendar year. That means we start the first of January and we end December 31st.

But companies don't always operate that way. Sometimes they'll start maybe it's the 1st of April and run through March 31st. So the question here is uh how do you compare companies where let's say that period of January 1st to March 31st for one company is their first quarter and when a different company January 1st to March 31st is their fourth quarter because you expect different things in the fourth quarter for a company because they may be doing things tax-wise and different different kind of things uh come into impact there.

It may also affect when they pay their dividends and several different things. So, how do you compare? Let's say you've got two companies you're trying to compare. How do you compare those things? Well, what they're talking about when they say calendarize, all they're talking about is comparing like quarters to like quarters. So that what you're doing is if the fourth quarter of one company is uh say basically the first quarter of a normal year that you compare the first quarter of one company to the fourth quarter of another uh the first calendar quarter to the fourth calendar quarter of another company. so that you're comparing the two fourth quarters of each of those companies in terms of their fiscal year.

And it's just an easy way to do that by putting them on the calendar a little bit differently so that you can compare them and you run their results back. And again, what you're trying to do with this is come up with some kind of a trend. what is happening with either company uh over the last might be over the last year, 5 years, 10 years and you're looking for those trends. So, you want to make sure you're comparing the appropriate quarters for each

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