Finance for Non-Finance Professionals

Explore essential financial statements, their elements and qualitative characteristics, and learn the complete set including balance sheet, profit and loss account, cash flow, notes on accounts, and changes in equity.

Understand the complete set of financial statements, including balance sheet, income statement, cash flow statement, notes on accounts, and changes in equity, and grasp assets, liabilities, income, expenses, and equity.

Explore how the balance sheet shows assets, liabilities, and owner's equity as a snapshot of financial health, with current and non-current assets and liabilities.

Learn how the profit and loss account for a period shows operational efficiency by matching revenue with expenses, detailing gross profit and net profit, plus budget and prior-year comparisons.

Treat cash flow as the oxygen of the business and master the three cash flow activities—operating, investing, and financing—using a rolling forecast to ensure sustained liquidity.

The lecture explains how the statement of changes in equity bridges beginning and ending equity through profits, losses, dividends, and capital movements, and why notes on accounts accompany the statements.

Explore how financial statements are analyzed using financial ratios—comparisons of two figures like net profit to revenue—and learn about liquidity, efficiency, leverage, and profitability ratios.

Explore liquidity concepts by analyzing current assets and current liabilities, and learn how the current ratio and quick ratio assess a company’s ability to meet obligations.

Assess how efficiently a business uses resources to generate profit through efficiency ratios. Explore days sales outstanding, inventory turnover, receivables, and asset turnover.

Explores leverage ratios, equity versus debt, and how borrowings affect overall capital. Learn about debt service coverage and interest coverage to assess profitability and lender risk.

Explore profitability ratios, including gross profit and net profit margins, and assess performance through comparisons to industry standards, return on equity, and return on assets employed.

Explore annual report fundamentals, accounting policies, and creative accounting across three modules, introducing annual report topics, policies, and creative techniques for non-finance professionals.

Examine the anatomy of a company's annual report—from the chairman's letter to auditors' report and financial statements—and assess how future outlook and long-term capacity investments inform shareholder insights.

Explore how accounting policies, especially depreciation, affect asset values and reported profits by choosing useful lives aligned with industry practice, and assess implications for financial statements.

Explore creative accounting, including fair value, historical cost, and revenue boosts. Remember that accounting remains simple, and reading notes reveals the true financial picture.

Explore cost concepts and decision making through CVP analysis, break-even analysis, and activity-based costing with responsibility accounting to strengthen business decisions.

Explore cost structure through CVP analysis by separating fixed and variable costs, computing contribution margin, and linking volume to profit or loss.

Explore break even analysis, where sales revenue equals total costs (fixed plus variable), and learn to calculate the break even point, margin of safety, and profitability targets.

Apply activity based costing to measure activity costs and assess value added; use responsibility accounting to evaluate cost centers and profit centers against budgets.

Explore financial budgeting and investment decisions in section six, organized into three modules, and gain practical insights for business decision making.

Learn how to build a practical financial budget from a revenue plan to capital budgeting, manpower and infrastructure needs, using fixed and flexible budgets, variances, and root cost analysis.

Make informed investment decisions by applying time value of money and discounting future cash flows. Evaluate net present value and internal rate of return against cost of capital.

Clarify the distinction between accounting and finance, analyze complete financial statements with ratios, and apply capital budgeting concepts like net present value and internal rate of return to decisions.