Financial Analysis of Organizations

Overview

This course focuses on adopting and implementing a financially analytic mindset when analyzing organizational activities, position and performance. This course begins with an overview of an organization’s financial statements, including the balance sheet, income statement, cash flow statement, as well as the transactions that comprise these statements. You will learn about tools and ratios that help analyze these financial statements and transactions. Financial statement analysis will help you understand how the company has performed in the past and its current position. This analysis - as well as course content on forecasting both short- and long-term performance - enables you to draw inferences, make predictions about the organization's future performance and value. Ultimately, this course provides a "deep-dive" into the multi-dimensional nature of financial analysis and how it used to assess the value of organizations.

Syllabus

Course Introduction and Module 1: Financial Statements - A Deeper Dive Into Company Position

This module will explain the basics of the balance sheet, provide a working definition of assets, and give you an overview of assets typically presented on the balance sheet. You will then be introduced to the concept of liabilities and explain what they are and how they can arise. This module will then build an intuition for what equity represents. It will also explain how the components of the balance sheet relate to one another.

Module 2: Financial Statements - A Deeper Dive Into Company Performance

This module introduces you to the primary components of the income statement by focusing on the concepts of revenue and cost of goods sold. The module also discusses examples of other income and expenses included in a typical income statement and introduces you to the statement of cash flows.

Financial Statement Ratios

In this module, we will learn how to calculate financial ratios that measure concepts such as liquidity, leverage, and profitability. We will work with accounting statements and financial data from real world companies and learn how to use this data to measure the financial health of companies and make comparisons with competitors.

Module 4: Forecasting Financial Statements

In this module, we will learn models that allow us to forecast and manage a company's capital expenditures. We will forecast the future financial statements of a company and learn how to figure out how much external financing the company will need.