Normalized Earnings

Adjustments made to financial statements to eliminate one-off effects that may impact the revenue

Over 1.8 million professionals use CFI to learn accounting, financial analysis, modeling and more. Start with a free account to explore 20+ always-free courses and hundreds of finance templates and cheat sheets.

What are Normalized Earnings?

Normalized earnings refer to adjustments made to financial statements to eliminate one-off effects that may impact the net income. A fundamental premise of normalizing earnings is to help financial analysts, investors, and other stakeholders gain insights into a company’s actual financial performance from its core business operations.

Normalized Earnings

Normalizing a company’s earnings also serves as the first step for assessing corporate activities, such as mergers and acquisitions, business evaluation, and benchmarking. A typical example of normalization would involve removing the gain or loss from the sale  of an fixed asset from a retail company’s financial statements whose main operations is selling food products.

Thus, normalized earnings flatten the earnings fluctuations to provide an estimated value of average earnings that omits nonrecurring charges or gains that a company would realize in a year.

Summary

  • Normalized earnings are retrospective adjustments in the financial statements to eliminate the one-off effects of gains and losses.
  • Companies use normalized earnings as a tool for evaluating their financial health and overall performance over time.
  • Normalizing earnings is used by financial analysts in mergers and acquisitions and business evaluation.

Understanding Normalized Earnings

Companies will eliminate the one-off effects of any nonrecurring gains and losses to represent their core businesses better. Companies use normalized earnings as a method for assessing their financial health and overall performance over time. Often, companies bear the brunt of these one-off expenses, including the sale of old, non-operating assets or incurred litigation fees.

In such scenarios, a company recognizes these gains or losses which impact its cash flow, however the costs do not reflect a company’s long-term term performance. Therefore the effects must be removed for proper analysis of a company, as they portray an inaccurate earnings trend. A company could have a net loss in a year, but positive normalized earnings if there are large nonrecurring losses.

Examples of Normalized Earnings

The most common adjustment to get normalized earnings is when smoothening of the sales cycle is necessary or when revenues or expenses must be waded off, and it can be performed in two ways.

The first case is when a company in possession of a fleet of old vehicles replaces the depreciating assets with a new vehicle by selling the old fleet. The expenses or income realized are normalized to obtain its real average earnings. The company’s income statements are then assessed to eliminate the revenue earned through comprehensive income. In effect, it removes the operating expenses incurred during the purchase.

The second approach involves normalizing earnings for a company whose sales are seasonal. When sales occur in cycles, moving averages are used to adjust overtime earnings.

Investors use normalized earnings to compare the financial health of companies. In some cases, standard metrics, such as earnings per share, can be influenced by the time they were calculated. It is common when recorded gains or losses are not related to the company’s core business activities realized during the period.

Special Case for Private Entities

Privately-traded companies may deviate from common industry standards of accounting. The reason behind the fact is that the normalization of earnings method is ideal within the course of business valuation for comparison purposes.

In such regard, a privately-held company may adopt the first-in, first-out method (FIFO). Although the technique may result in different values compared to the normalization of earnings, it can impact a company’s earnings value.

Related Readings

CFI is the official provider of the Commercial Banking & Credit Analyst (CBCA)™ certification program, designed to transform anyone into a world-class financial analyst.

In order to help you become a world-class financial analyst and advance your career to your fullest potential, these additional resources will be very helpful:

Free Accounting Courses

Learn accounting fundamentals and how to read financial statements with CFI’s free online accounting classes.
These courses will give the confidence you need to perform world-class financial analyst work. Start now!

 

Building confidence in your accounting skills is easy with CFI courses! Enroll now for FREE to start advancing your career!

0 search results for ‘