Stripping away one-time adjustments, including acquisition charges, payroll taxes on stock options that employees exercised during the quarter and a downward revaluation of stock investments to reflect their lower value in the market, Cisco earned about $1 billion, or 14 cents a share in the quarter.
The fourth-quarter results excluded several one-time adjustments, related mostly to charges incurred as a result of regulatory changes.
These figures reflected an accounting change related to a widespread change in the accounting of good will and other one-time adjustments.
Excluding accounting charges, those gains and other one-time adjustments, the company's operating income rose 6percentto to $2.4 billion, or 12 cents a share.
More broadly, revenue from securities and banking revenue for the quarter was down, too, at $5.08 billion — a figure that excludes one-time adjustments.
But perhaps it is bearable: over the long term, beyond one-time adjustments, the after-tax income of the average American family would fall by 6.6 to 7.1 percent.
Susan Decker, Yahoo's chief financial officer, said it was dropping the pro forma measure because the new accounting rules allow it to take fewer quarterly charges relating to their acquisitions, although many, like Yahoo, have to make one-time adjustments this quarter.
Chinese statisticians also tend to throw lots of one-time adjustments into December figures to offset data problems that crept in during the year, so December results receive little credence and in some cases are not even announced by the Chinese government.
After watching net income (less one-time adjustments) slide three years in a row, Jones finally has some breathing room.
Accounting Restatement – At the time the change is implemented, one-time adjustments will be required to the prior year's financials so proper year-over-year comparisons can be made.
Others, like Pew, made one-time adjustments because they understood that their data might be flawed or unrepresentative.
