An Introduction to Financial Intelligence

Entrepreneurs, directors, investors, shareholders or managers need to understand how to manage money. Whether or not you have financial education, this course is designed to help you expand your financial intelligence as it is a core competency for anyone seeking to make money. Leaders, managers and even employees need to understand financial information and how financial success is measured to make informed decisions and we can help you to read and interpret financial statements, probe performance issues and identify their roots. We explain the impact of financial decisions and how to measure your next investment or financing option intelligently. After addressing financial information, we dive into the financial accounting system and processes, accounting rules and regulations and an explanation of internal controls and regulating agencies.

The hallmark of financial intelligence is being able to pick up a financial statement, make sense of it, ask the right questions to fill in the gaps and make an informed decision. We start with the income statement to make you competent in both vertical and horizontal analysis to see what has been driving a company's financial performance over several years. We unpack how to calculate return ratios to understand a company’s performance on a deeper level. Then comes the balance sheet as we demonstrate how to tell good from bad assets, how to determine working capital, how to manage liabilities to prevent your company from incurring too much debt and how to understand equity. We study equity as you take a business valuation crash course to determine its ‘fair value’ and teach you how to analyze a cash flow statement, which helps you to bridge your understanding of the income statement and the balance sheet to ascertain the cash impact of management decisions.

We then move from studying financial accounting to management accounting. While financial accounting helps you determine what has happened in a business, management accounting enables you to determine what is happening in an industry and attributes cause and effect relationships to the results. This helps you to pinpoint the root of a problem and find who is accountable. We show you how to perform a variance analysis when results vary from expectations, which helps to control costs and improve operational efficiency. We teach you how to prepare an annual budget and perform a costing analysis to determine the actual costs of each service or product in your company as we explore different approaches to budgeting. Towards the end of the course, we move away from accounting and study finance. Unlike financial and management accounting, finance looks into the future and can help you make your next investment decision or negotiate your financing options. You don’t need a background in finance or accounting to take this course as it will help anyone who wants to make better business decisions, from managers to entrepreneurs to investors. We can teach you how to make your money work for you.