How FC financing works for BIG, page-265

@BeerBaron I think you may have missed the forest.

The main issue here is about whether Big has been deceptive about cash and customers. Clearly there a lot of differing opinions on this.

There are numerous ways companies can fake cash. One of the is to have a little known financing of a Ponzi like stream of customers.

A second way to to inflate cash and make operating cash flow look great is to move operating costs off the cash flow statement. This can be done by capitalising operating costs on to the balance sheet or by moving them to the equity statement.

To use your analogy Big has made 11,473 burgers, but only 791 customers have accepted the burgers.
Yes there are 2,727 people looking at the burgers who Big considers to be customers. Big has received cash for these customers from FC, but those people are just looking at the burgers.

Is it conservative to count the cash loaned to you for people looking at your burgers?

The burger shop also pays much of it's costs with shares in the burger shop. So those costs don't show up on the cash flow statement.

With that analogy how can you tell what are the real costs for the burger shop? How can you tell how much cash they are actually bringing in?