Advice on looking through a 10-K and an attempt at my first valuation

I'm trying to go through a company's 10-K very thoroughly in order to both grasp how it works and to try and separate operating and nonoperating assets and liabilities (eventually I want to value the company and present the valuation to a small boutique firm with my resume). That includes combing exhaustively through the notes even the Consolidated Statement of Shareholders' Equity in order to see how the accounting works (to the point where I can more or less reconstruct journal entries) and what exactly is in every line item. Figuring out what is in every line item is fairly easy with research but it's much harder trying to reconstruct the journal entry that most likely resulted which I feel like gives a much broader and interconnected view of line items. The difficulty is partially a result of numbers often not matching up between the notes and the financial statements and I can't figure out if it's due to rounding error, foreign currency effects, or something other than that such as a loss on a accelerated share repurchase agreement. This is tedious and time consuming work, for instance, it took me like 2 days to figure out how Restricted Stock Awards and Units were differentiated and their tax implications for accounting etc. and that was a single note so I'm just trying to make sure I'm going about this in the correct way and not wasting my time.

(Please note I'm not complaining about this task as I find it enjoyable and I've read the two famous posts here about starting the research process. I'm just wondering if figuring out the accounting treatment of line items in order to better grasp their implications on a companies financials is something standard in a research process.)