10-K Wrap

Finance allah shmoop what is a fiscal year versus a

calendar year Well let's start with the latter calendar year

that's this thing It starts january one with a hangover

and ends at midnight December thirty one with a big

fat ball dropping in new york No this thing different

ball paul's Never All right So that's a calendar year

and okay so what is a fiscal year And how

is it different from a calendar year Well it isn't

always different Actually a fiscal year just refers to the

one year period in which companies track and report their

financial story Some companies report from january one to december

thirty one right like their fiscal year maps on top

of the calendar year But in some cases this reporting

system was misleading or problematic for investors Why All right

Well let's take macy's please They used to be somebody

Somebody They had parades and white flower day sales and

people used to actually go to their stores So macy's

did some huge percentage of its sales for the year

right around christmas And before you know computers were really

a thing it often took weeks or months toe fairly

And accurately add everything up so macy's among others decided

to change their fiscal year They were powerful back then

so you know they could do things like that So

they moved their year to run from july one until

june thirty that is that became their fiscal year it's

still a year still three hundred sixty five days still

everything the same With the exception of the start and

end points this way When things were relatively quiet at

the end of june the macy's bean counters could properly

count their year end beans in relative peace and harmony

Having caught up from the day luge of frenzied christmas

sales it gets even more complex in that some companies

wanted to be fully off kilter for any comparable calendar

years Oracle the database company for example is one of

them Savvy buyers of databases would wait until just before

the quarter ended for oracle hoping to negotiate better rates

in renting their database needs It was dangerous for a

company to miss its quarter with so much competition in

silicon valley from startups to steal those precious engineers from

big companies and put him into running a startups You

know big companies and they paid in cash and modest

stock options You can't really get rich these days working

at oracle if oracle ever missed a quarter while it

would hemorrhage engineers to the venture capital people hovering in

the hallways so oracle moved its fiscal ofthe month I'ii

february may august november kind of vibe so that wouldn't

be quite as held hostage by those savvy database renters

hoping for a macy style midnight white flower day sale

Now that's something worthy of a parade There's a database 00:03:00.715 --> [endTime] parade