What is the importance of other comprehensive income?

A company's statement of profit and loss, also known as its income statement, has its drawbacks. For the most part, the statement accurately reflects a company's past profitability, and earnings growth is one of the primary determinants of a firm's share price performance, but it remains a subjective measure that is open to manipulation. In particular, companies have a fair amount of latitude on the timing and impact of quarterly and annual charges and other expenses.

How a firm generates revenues and turns them into earnings is an important factor, but there are other important considerations. The Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) has continued to emphasize a financial measure called other comprehensive income (OCI) as a valuable financial analysis tool. The FASB's stated goal, in general, is to issue guidance "to improve the comparability, consistency and transparency of financial reporting." To accomplish this, it has sought to "increase the prominence of items reported in other comprehensive income."

The Basics of OIC

Other comprehensive income can be seen as a more expansive view of net income. In the past, changes to a company's profits that were deemed to be outside of its core operations or overly volatile were allowed to flow through to shareholders' equity. OCI provides important details on these figures. Bear in mind that OCI is not the same as comprehensive income, though they certainly sound alike. Comprehensive income is simply the combination of standard net income and OCI. As such, it is literally a more comprehensive and holistic view of the drivers of a company's operations and other activities that are an integral component of its economics.

Source : Investopedia