Finance Fundamentals Courses

Finance refers to how money transfers between those who save it or invest it and those who need it. The process of "financing" means you provide money to help make it possible. Therefore, the world of finance involves all the tools, methodologies, and technologies involved in getting money to people who either want to spend it or lend it to someone else. This includes banks, private lenders, equity funds, and stockholders. It also involves individual borrowers, companies that need funds to support growth, and the systems that help financial parties interact. Finance is involved in all types of lending and borrowing, including those that don't include traditional money. For example, cryptocurrencies include decentralized finance as an important element of the digital asset world, and when commodities are traded for each other, financial principles and structures guide the process.

While finance fundamentals involve more than math, basic math skills are a must, including understanding how to use them to create efficient and well-organized Excel spreadsheets. You also need to know how to present your ideas—either verbally or through writing—with concision and clarity. In addition, you need to build a financial forecast, which outlines to stakeholders the most likely trajectory of a financial strategy or development. In addition to the skills required to create and present financial reports, you also need to be able to problem-solve issues using straightforward logic and sift through large amounts of data, analyze what you see, and use what you discerned to formulate plans of action. To understand how minor and major factors interact, you also need to grasp both high-level concepts and granular details and see how they intersect with each other.

While there are many different applications for finance, there are three basic categories: corporate finance, personal finance, and government finance. Corporate finance includes interactions, agreements, and the application of financial instruments that help companies grow, support their sales, products, and services, and invest in other companies or products. In corporate finance, the corporation itself is a financial entity, and its payment history, funds, assets, and liabilities are all part of its financial picture. Personal finance refers to the financial matters of individual people, including how they manage money, investments, and borrowing. With government finance, a local, state, or national government is the financial entity engaged in borrowing, lending, and managing funds. They can source money from other governments, banks, and private individuals by issuing bonds.