A comparative balance sheet is a balance sheet that shows a company's assets, liabilities and equity at two or more dates in side-by-side columns, usually the end of the current year and the end of the prior year. It is the balance sheet component of comparative financial statements.
Reading a comparative balance sheet
The extra column turns a single snapshot into a record of change. A reader can see at a glance whether cash rose or fell, whether receivables or inventory grew faster than sales, and whether the business took on more debt. Many comparative balance sheets add columns for the dollar change and the percentage change, a technique known as horizontal analysis. If cash was $64,000 at the end of 2024 and $80,000 at the end of 2025, the change is $16,000, or 25 percent of the earlier figure.
Comparative balance sheets are also the starting point for the statement of cash flows under the indirect method, since the changes in each working capital account explain much of the difference between net income and cash from operations.
For US public companies, the SEC's Regulation S-X requires audited balance sheets as of the end of each of the two most recent fiscal years in the annual report on Form 10-K. The income statement, by contrast, generally covers three years, or two for smaller reporting companies. When an accounting policy changes, prior-year columns are normally adjusted so that both years are measured on the same basis and remain comparable.