Business finance management encompasses many different aspects of running a business. From interpreting financial statements to budgeting and forecasting, mastery of business finance basics can make or break a company’s success.
The following online courses cover key topics like bookkeeping principles, the theory behind budgeting and best practice credit control processes.
How Finance Works
If you’re not a numbers person, balance sheets and financial jargon can be intimidating. But the ability to make smart financial decisions is crucial for anyone who wants to advance their career. In this hands-on guide to the basics of finance, Harvard Business School professor Mihir Desai takes a deep dive into the world of money, demystifying it along the way.
Through entertaining stories, interactive exercises, full-color visuals, and a conversational style that belies the subject matter, this book makes finance come alive (no MBA required).
Whether you’re an aspiring CFO, a manager looking to grow your skills, or an entrepreneur, How Finance Works will give you the tools to become financially intelligent. It’s the perfect primer for learning about the foundations of finance, financial analysis, capital markets, value creation, company valuation, and capital allocation. Based on a popular class taught by Desai, this book is an HBR guide on steroids. You’ll soon be thinking like a financial wizard!
The Personal MBA
Whether you’re starting a business or trying to advance your career, mastering the fundamentals of management will help. International best-selling author Josh Kaufman, whose work has helped millions learn the skills of business success, guides you through the ideas that underpin every modern business. Understand how businesses create value, deliver it to customers, and bring in revenue. Master the basics of product development, marketing, sales, finance, accounting, and more.
The traditional MBA is a poor investment: it requires you to mortgage your house, teaches out-dated concepts, and doesn’t guarantee a high paying job. The Personal MBA brings you a world-class business education for the price of a book.
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How to Read a Financial Report
Financial reports provide a wide range of important information about an organization’s cash flow and financial condition. Yet, for most business professionals without accounting or finance backgrounds, interpreting these documents can be challenging.
As a result, many business leaders and managers are missing vital opportunities to make the best decisions possible about their companies. This course is designed to teach non-specialists the fundamentals of reading and analyzing financial statements in straightforward, jargon-free language.
Financial statements can be a useful tool for any company’s board, investors and key stakeholders to evaluate its success or identify issues. They can be compiled on a monthly, quarterly or annual basis and are often required by lenders or potential investors as part of the application process. The most common documents include income and cash flow statements as well as the balance sheet, which lists and totals assets, liabilities and owner equity. All three of these together give a full picture of the company’s current financial status and its performance over time.
Financial Statement Analysis
Financial statement analysis involves the review of a business’s primary financial statements, including balance sheets, income statements and cash flow statements. This data is used by investors to make decisions about investing in companies, creditors to determine how much credit to extend and business owners to understand their businesses’ performance and value creation potential.
The most common methods of analyzing financial statements include horizontal and vertical analysis. Horizontal analysis compares data from different time periods and can help identify growth trends within a company. For example, if revenue has increased significantly from one year to the next, this would indicate positive business development and growth.
Vertical analysis, on the other hand, focuses on comparing data items to each other. This method allows for more granular relationships between data, such as expense items expressed as percentages of total sales or asset line item amounts expressed as a percentage of total assets. This can reveal a number of important trends, such as the amount of unearned revenue in relation to earned revenues.