How I approach a stock depends to some extent upon the present market environment.
For example, in the current environment the first thing I do when looking at a company is to go to the balance sheet and see what its debt load looks like and what its liquidity situation looks like (I love nice cash cushions in this environment). Next I venture to the cash flow statement and look at how well the cash flow generator is working (this also gives me a peak at quality of earnings). Finally, I'll mozy on over to the income statement and look at the company's cost structure and see whether there are any funny things sticking out of the accounts.
After a quick review of those factors, it is then onto the business of digging deeper and getting a handle on operating leverage, debt schedule, cash conversion cycle, etc., and marrying those with future growth and margin cycle implications. The trick is then to condense that into an expected present value of the company and to compare that (with an imputed risk factor) to its current market price.
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