About the course
Are financial statements a mystery to you? Do all those terms and metrics make your head spin? Do you avoid conversations with your finance leaders because you are not confident of your finance ability?
Having a solid understanding of financial terms, statements and metrics is critical to becoming a successful entrepreneur or manager. In this finance course, you will learn how to interpret and use the information contained in financial statements to make key operating decisions, evaluate business performance, and create forecasts of profits and cash flow.
This course introduces you to the form, content, and definitions included in the primary financial statements: income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow statement. You will learn how to use this information to make key operating decisions, such as how to balance growth with cash constraints. You will learn how to use ratios to diagnose a company’s financial health and apply these concepts and tools to evaluate a company of your own choosing.
Eliminate your fear of accounting! Financial accounting can be fun once the barriers to learning are broken down. Through a series of learning scenarios that take you through the creation of a simple business, you will become comfortable with basic accounting tools and concepts that you need to more effectively manage your business. By the end of the course, you will become a much more confident user of financial information and will be able to effectively engage with your finance leaders.
This course is part of the Business Principles and Entrepreneurial Thought XSeries.
What you will learn
By the end of this course, you will be able to understand:
- How primary financial statements are constructed and what types of information is captured in each statement;
- How cash and profits can differ and how to use that information to effectively manage growth;
- How to calculate key performance ratios and use those metrics to evaluate the performance of your business;
- How to create a financial forecast that you can use to better manage your business and to present to potential investors and creditors.
About the instructor
Peter Wilson currently serves on the faculty of Babson College where he teaches courses in financial reporting and financial statement analysis in the Accounting and Law Division. He has served as the Executive Director of Graduate Blended Learning Programs at Babson overseeing Babson’s Blended Learning MBA program delivered on campuses in Wellesley and San Francisco.
Dr. Wilson holds a BA degree in Philosophy from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, an MBA degree from UNC-Greensboro, and a Ph.D. degree in Accounting from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Duration: 4 weeks, 406 hours per week
Language: English
Instructor: Peter Wilson
Institution: Babson College
