(4.4 user rating)

This course provides the essential skills to understand and manage the financial health of a business. You’ll learn how to read financial reports, analyze performance, and make sound financial decisions.

Skills you will learn

• Master accounting fundamentals: Learn the principles of bookkeeping, understand the accounting equation, and become proficient in preparing and reading key financial statements.
• Analyze and plan for the future: Use financial analysis techniques to evaluate business performance, understand the time value of money, and learn how to create effective budgets.
• Apply skills in a real-world context: Gain an understanding of financial markets and see how a comparative analysis of Nike and Lululemon is conducted.

About this course

This course begins by building a solid foundation in accounting, the language of business. You’ll start with the fundamentals of bookkeeping and the core accounting equation. We then guide you through creating and interpreting the three key financial statements: the Income Statement, the Balance Sheet, and the Cash Flow Statement.

Once you can read the financial story of a business, you’ll learn how to analyze it. This section introduces powerful financial analysis techniques and ratios to assess a company’s profitability, liquidity, and overall health. We also cover essential financial concepts like the time value of money and provide practical tools for creating and managing budgets to guide future performance.

The course culminates in a detailed case study that demonstrates how to apply these skills in the real world. We will walk you through a comparative financial analysis of two industry leaders, Nike and Lululemon, showing you how financial data is used to draw strategic insights about their performance and position.