56 The Financial Times Guide to Corporate Valuation
carrying out the valuation and whether you think calculating enterprise
value will give rise to more complexities than the accounting differences
will. But, if an enterprise valuation suits your purposes, there are a number
of statistics to choose from which are less influenced by accounting.
These include:
Sales (revenues). As the top line of the income statement, sales tend
to be comparable between companies and even between markets.
However, sales do not consider any of the costs involved in the busi-
ness and do not give any measure of profitability. Also, caution needs
to be taken since sales are not completely unaffected by accounting dif-
ferences. In particular, ...