Finance for Non-Financial Professionals Journey

Finance and accounting are at the heart of every business. Even if your role isn't directly related to finance, your activities may still have financial implications. This course explains the basics of finance for non-finance professionals, and covers key accounting and finance essentials and concepts: the basic accounting equation, accrual-based accounting, and basic accounting principles. It explores business finance, including how business transactions affect financial statements and the bottom line. You'll walk through the four-step accounting process, and you'll learn the fundamental principles of cash flow management and the four types of financial risk.

It's not only the Finance department that needs to understand budgeting and finance essentials. Given the importance of finance for non-finance professionals, it's in everyone's best interest to have some basic knowledge of one of the most important aspects of business finance - budgeting. In this course, you'll learn to identify the characteristics of an effective budget, the stages in planning one, and how to distinguish between budgets types. You'll also explore budgeting concepts and techniques such as historical and zero-based budgeting, variance analysis, capital budgeting, and performing budgeting calculations.

How do organizations communicate vital business and finance information? Achieving the utmost clarity in communication requires knowledge of financial management and a strong understanding of accounting basics. Accounting an internal function that involves identifying, recording, summarizing, and reporting business transactions and financial events in an organization. In this course, you'll learn the core concepts and financial essentials of accounting, such as the accounting equation and its components, as well as the rule of debits and credits. You'll also develop your financial acumen by exploring the accounting cycle, and the effect of cash and accrual-based accounting systems.

If your organizational role is related to accounting or finance, you'll most likely need solid financial acumen and a strong grasp of the accounting basics of recording, posting, and balancing your organization's books. In this course, you'll learn financial essentials related to bookkeeping, such as the steps in the accounting cycle that happen after transactions have been identified and analyzed. You'll learn how to carry out vital financial management activities, including how to make general and special journal entries, and how to post those transactions to accounts in the general and subsidiary ledgers. You'll also learn how to prepare trial balances and make adjusting entries.

Developing your financial acumen is a must in today's economy, and improving your knowledge of accounting basics and financial management is a good first step. In this course, you'll explore the financial essentials that will enable you to understand key steps in the management of finance within the accounting cycle. You'll learn how, once you've worked your way through recording transactions and posting to ledgers, you're ready to start preparing financial statements. You'll learn about Income Statements, Balance Sheets, Cash Flow Statements, and how they're interrelated. You'll also learn about the steps involved in closing accounts.

One of the great advantages of a corporate form of organization is it allows otherwise unaffiliated people to join in mutual ownership of a business. Therefore, everyone involved needs an understanding of the financial essentials and how they influence the company's overall financial management. Strengthening your own financial acumen with a knowledge of accounting basics is the first step. In this course, you'll learn about the key characteristics of finance within incorporated organizations. You'll explore how common financial transactions affect the corporations' financial position. You'll also learn concepts and accounting processes for corporate transactions, including those involving common and preferred stocks, treasury stocks, and dividends.

To maintain your company's finances, you need a strong knowledge of business finance. And to improve the financial well-being of your company, it's vital to understand key financial statements, such as the Income Statement, Cash Flow Statement, and Balance Sheet, as these will hint at problems and possible solutions. This course will give you an overview of these three statements. You'll also explore typical examples of financial statements, learn how each financial statement relates to the other, and discover what each one indicates about your company's financial position.

Financial analysis helps you understand your organization's business finance, as well as its strengths and weaknesses. This course explains finance for non-finance professional in easy-to-understand language, with a specific focus on financial statements. You'll learn about methods for analyzing financial statements from the perspective of a non-financial professional. You'll explore the concept of the Time Value of Money. You'll also examine how to use common financial ratios for profitability, efficiency, liquidity, and solvency, and study percentage calculations. Finally, you'll be introduced to vertical and horizontal analysis.

Workplace cost consciousness enables a company's financial success. Cost control is every team member's responsibility and requires planning and effort. In this course, you'll learn how employees can contribute to cost-control efforts by making cost changes, including to travel, supply, and facility costs.

Managing costs effectively is critical to the financial success of a business and can help you avoid painful cuts. Cost control is a team effort that requires careful cost management. In this course, you'll learn how to identify cost management opportunities, get your team involved in cost-control efforts, and use tools like cost splitting and Lean.

Computational thinking is a structured way to understand and solve the kind of complex problems facing most organizations today. First developed in conjunction with developing computer systems, it can be applied to many situations, both computerized and not. And it can help determine the right types of computer and human actions to apply in order to solve a problem. In this course, you'll learn the characteristics of computational thinking, including problem expression, as well as of its core techniques, such as decompositions and pattern recognition. You'll also learn how abstraction is used in logical problem solving to build algorithms that create and evaluate business solutions.

With the use of artificial intelligence and smart devices on the rise, business networks are strained under the heavy load of data. Edge computing seeks to move data processing, collection, and delivery closer to the end user - to the so-called edge of the network. Edge data and local processing are fast becoming standard features in modern business networks. Edge computing can reduce costs and latency issues, improve data management and data warehousing, and enhance business continuity. In this course, you'll learn about the benefits and challenges of edge computing. You'll also learn how to properly utilize a data warehouse and plan for implementing it into your business operation. And you'll examine the considerations and best practices for implementing and utilizing edge computing in your organization.

The main aim of your organization's product or service is to help your customers achieve a specific goal or overcome a problem. This is where the concept of design thinking comes in. Design thinking is a customer-centric approach to determining how best to meet customer needs. In this course, you'll explore ways to develop customer focus to help you define problems. You'll explore design thinking strategies, including how to reframe problems, how to brainstorm solutions, and when to use prototypes. You'll also identify best practices for user testing, as well as for and gathering and reviewing feedback for effective problem solving.

When struggling with a difficult problem, it's easy to become hemmed in by traditional habitual thinking. Learning to leverage the power of analogical thinking allows you to think creatively and gain fresh insights through the exploration of unexpected similarities. In this course, you'll learn what analogical thinking is, when it's best used, and how to use it. You'll also learn under what situations it can fail, and how to avoid superficial analogies so you can make better strategic choices.

Systems thinking allows you to understand how systems work, as well as your role in them. Systems thinking affords you the ability to see the interrelationships among all events, putting you in a better position to address problems.

Solving problems requires strategic thinking. You need to ask the right people the right questions to get to the source of the issue and find the solution. In this course, you'll learn about identifying stakeholders, gaining their input and trust, and using analysis techniques to get to the root cause of a problem.

Before you start looking for solutions to a problem, it's helpful to know what people want in an ideal world. This will give you some direction and aid in the strategic thinking needed to create alternative solutions. In this course, you'll learn how to define ideal states and generate and evaluate problem solutions. You'll also learn how to recognize and avoid common pitfalls when solving problems.

When the time comes to make a final, critical decision, you need to be able to understand the reasons for making that decision, as well as its possible consequences. You must also assess the effectiveness of your decisive action in solving a particular organizational problem. In this course, you'll learn techniques for making decisions based on key criteria, such as costs, time constraints, and organizational goals. You'll explore different decision-making styles, and how each can help in problem solving. You'll also learn how to plan, manage, evaluate, and celebrate solution implementation.

High-performing enterprises employ purpose-based data sourcing to effectively address well-framed business opportunities. In this course you'll learn how to identify, scope, and validate data for effective decision making. This course was developed with subject matter provided by the International Institute for Analytics. (www.iianalytics.com)

Organizations around the world are now realizing the many advantages of using data to overhaul their business strategies and gain a competitive edge. However, data-driven decision making doesn't mean you have to ignore your intuition or past experience. In fact, when used in combination with business acumen, building a data-driven decision-making culture can be a powerful tool for change. In this course, you'll learn about the benefits that occur when an organization makes decisions using data as the basis of their choice. You'll explore best practices for taking a balanced approach to decisions that don't rely on a single perspective. And you'll also learn how to avoid common mistakes associated with using data to inform decisions.

Discover how to go further with your Excel document through understanding potential formula errors, use intelligent data types, and set goals to reach targets as well as problem-solve with the Solver and Forecast tools offered by Excel 2019. Key concepts in this 7-video course include how to identify formula errors and to understand the wide range of formula error messages; how to check for and evaluate formulas in a workbook; and how to use formulas to estimate loan-related costs and help you estimate and managed repayments. Continue by learning how to use the Goal Seek tool to modify a data variable and reach a target value; how to use the Solver add-in to analyze constraints and variables and optimize data values; and how to insert a Forecast worksheet to display trends and predictions based on available historic data. Finally, observe how to use Data Tables to create what if, variable-based scenarios, and once created, learn to adjust the values and change the calculation options. In order to practice what you have learned, you will find the Word document named Excel 2019 for Windows: Forecasting & Solving Problems Exercise as well as the associated materials in the Resources section.

Excel tables are a useful tool for quickly managing, analyzing, and manipulating data in a range. Once configured as a table, you can easily sort, filter, and perform calculations on your data, as well as change its appearance and formatting. Key concepts covered in this 6-video course include how to convert a data range into an table and edit its contents, giving you greater control over the inserted information; and how to perform calculations and manipulate data in an table such as create calculated columns to perform automatic calculations on data, quickly clean up your data with a sweep, and transform your data range into a PivotTable. Learners continue by examining how tables are highly customizable, as you learn how to use formatting tools and styles to change the appearance of a table, then learn to customize the table settings and tools. Finally, you will learn how to use slicers which can be used to filter and manipulate data in a table; and how to resize and format a slicer. In order to practice what you have learned, you will find the Word document named Excel 2019 for Windows: Working with Excel Tables Exercise as well as the associated materials in the Resources section.

Excel includes powerful tools to summarize, sort, count, and chart data. In this 11-video course, you will learn how to create, edit, and format pivot tables, sort, filter, and group data, and work with slicers and timelines. Key concepts covered in this course include how to create and insert a PivotTable; how to edit the source data and field setup in a PivotTable; how to use predefined styles and formatting tools to change the appearance of a PivotTable; and how to copy and move a PivotTable within a workbook. Next, learn how to use sort tools to change the display of data; how to use filter tools to show and hide data; and how to use label and value filters to analyze data. Finally, learn how to use group tools to sort and analyze related data and use a slicer to filter data; examine how to customize the behavior and appearance of a slicer; and observe how to customize the behavior and appearance of a slicer. In order to practice what you have learned, you will find the Word document named Excel 2019 for Windows: Inserting PivotTables Exercise as well as the associated materials in the Resources section.

Once your Excel PivotTables have been created, you will need to know how to manage and work with the data contained within. In this 8-video course, learners will learn how to analyze, calculate, collaborate, and more with Excel PivotTables. Key concepts covered in this course include how to use a PivotTable to find trends and drill into data, adding extra levels of detail and multiple value fields in a single table; how to use the Data Model to work with data from multiple tables; and how to import existing database tables into the Data Model and use them in a PivotTable. Next, learners will examine how to add Calculated fields that use already inserted data; how to use the Value field settings to work with values for comparison calculations; and how to see data from a PivotTable in a PivotChart then customize and format the PivotChart. Finally, because a PivotTable is highly customizable, you will observe how to configure and customize a PivotTable's display and control settings. In order to practice what you have learned, you will find the Word document named Excel 2019 for Windows: Working with Data in PivotTables Exercise as well as the associated materials in the Resources section.

A wide variety of Excel tools can be used to retrieve, return, and calculate data. In this 9-video course, learners will see how to retrieve date information and rank values, combine and separate data already available, and automate and simplify calculations with look-up tools and SUMPRODUCT. Key concepts covered here include how to extract date values and perform calculations by using dates; how to retrieve information relating to dates in the past, present, and future; and how to use ranking formulas to find smallest and largest values in a list. Next, learn how to extract data and separate values into separate cells; how to combine existing data values in a single cell; and how to analyze complex tables with multiple arrays to obtain summarized results. Continue by observing how to use VLOOKUP and HLOOKUP formulas to cross-reference data lists and check for missing values; how to use conditional formulas to perform a search across multiple tables and automatically insert data; and how to use VLOOKUP formula to cross-reference data lists and retrieve corresponding values. In order to practice what you have learned, you will find the Word document named Excel 2019 for Windows: Finding & Analyzing Information with Formulas Exercise as well as the associated materials in the Resources section.

Excel offers a set of tools that allows you to explore more in detail data analysis and complex formulae. In this 8-video course, you will learn how to use different formulae to make calculations when you have multiple conditions imposed. You will also become able to forecast data by using the NPER function. Key concepts covered in this course include how to import, edit, and update data from a text file; how to import, edit and update data from a .csv file; and how to use the LOOKUP, MATCH, and INDEX functions to extract data. Next, you will learn how to run multiple conditions without nesting other functions; examine how to calculate averages by using one or more conditions; and learn how to calculate the smallest and the largest numbers that meet one or more criteria. Finally, learn how to count cells that meet one or more criteria; and how to calculate the number of periods to pay a loan and forecast loan approval that meet one or more criteria. In order to practice what you have learned, you will find the Word document named Excel 2019 for Windows: Managing Data Exercise as well as the associated materials in the Resources section.