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Normalized Net Income

Normalization Adjustments

One-Time Items

Strip out non-recurring gains/losses (lawsuits, asset sales).

Owner Compensation

Adjust to market salary if owner is overpaid/underpaid.

Discretionary Spending

Personal expenses run through the business.

Why Normalize

Shows true ongoing profitability for valuation purposes.

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Learn about the process of normalizing net income, its importance in understanding business trends and valuation, the common non-recurring items, and detailed steps in calculating normalized net income using Starbucks' income statement as an example.

Normalizing net income refers to cleaning out the impact of non-recurring items to better understand a company’s ongoing net income.

Normalized net income helps in seeing the underlying trends in a business more clearly and plays an important role in valuation.

Non recurring item is a gain or loss found on a company's income statement that is not expected to occur regularly.

The identification of non-recurring items is subject to judgement, but the following are commonly considered:

  • Restructuring/reorganization costs
  • Unusual gains or losses
  • Accounting policy changes which mean the items will not exist in future
  • Fines and penalties
  • M&A costs
  • Impairments and write downs

Let’s take a look at the Income Statement of Starbucks. We did transfer all that information into the Excel spreadsheet to work on it.

Here it is. Let’s identify non recurring items here and exclude them from the calculation of Normalized Net Income. I will put all non recurring items in bold.

Also, we will combine line items to simplify our Income Statement for modeling.

I will use the data validation tool for that.

Highlight H5 – H22 (“IS” tab) and open Data Validation window (ALT A V). Choose “List” as a validation criteria and as a source a list of items from the “Normalized NI” tab with the simplified Income Statement for modeling. Then let’s allocate the line items into relative categories.

Now let’s use SUMIF function to sum up relative categories from the “IS” tab to the “Normalized NI” tab.

Let’s fill that formula to the right and down with CTRL + R and CTRL + D.

Let’s take care of totals now.

EBIT = Revenues – (Cost of sales + Operating Expenses + D&A).

EBT = EBIT + line items in the rows 9-11.

Next, I want to calculate income taxes for normalized EBT.

Let’s come back to the “IS” tab for that. And calculate the tax rate as Income Tax Expense / Earnings before Income Taxes. I will also find an average tax rate for the given historical years. It will give me 20.6%. I will take it as a tax rate to calculate Normalized Net Income.

Now let’s calculate Income Taxes for historical years as EBT * Tax Rate. And then calculate Normalized Net Income as EBT minus Income Taxes.

So, we just simplified Income Statement for financial modeling purposes and calculated Normalized Net Income.