Creating business models with excel using a financial statement?

Question

consists of balance sheet and income statement

Answer 1

I have a free open-source add-in that can collect information from the Internet for you. It is located in the files area at:

http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/smf_addin/

There are also templates in the files area for financial statements at some of the major services -- Yahoo, MSN, Reuters, Morningstar, etc.

You can also set up your own queries to get the information. If you do so, one source I would strongly recommend is AdvFN.

One good web site where they already do some "Rule #1" financial modeling based on Internet-collected data is this discussion forum:

http://www.ruleoneforum.com

As an example of what you can get from AdvFN via plain old queries, here's an EXCEL query file:

http://ogres-crypt.com/iqy/advfn-annual-financials.iqy

...and an EXCEL file that uses it to retrieve multiple 5-year chunks of data:

http://ogres-crypt.com/iqy/advfn-annual-financial-query.xls