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At the intersection between accounting, finance, strategy and social analysis, financial analysis enables us to penetrate the financial operation of a business with its balances and imbalances, grasp the financial reach of the strategies implemented, and analyze the value creation and distribution mechanisms. Its ability to reveal the issues of power is disturbing, and it incorporates a powerful normative dimension that is rarely explicit. This article seeks to explore the objectives and stakes of financial analysis through the history of one of its devices, the funds-flow statement, from the 1960s to the 1980s. Analysis of its various forms and the related controversies and conflicts highlights the concerns of the actors and economic institutions that influenced the choices made, examines how the role of financial analysis affects its representations of labor relations, and brings some of its unaddressed aspects out of the shadows.