Finance for Non-Finance Professionals

Go to Course: https://www.coursera.org/learn/finance-for-non-finance

Introduction

### Course Review: Finance for Non-Finance Professionals on Coursera #### Overview If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by finance lingo or avoided discussions about financial decisions due to a lack of understanding, **Finance for Non-Finance Professionals** is designed just for you. Offered on Coursera, this course condenses the essentials of a full-semester MBA finance class into a succinct, engaging format. It emphasizes intuitive understanding and conceptual clarity, making it accessible for individuals who may not have formal training in finance. This course serves as a roadmap to help you grasp how financial professionals make informed decisions. It covers crucial topics such as financial valuation, the time value of money, cash flow analysis, and capital budgeting while also providing practical applications and examples. #### Course Content The syllabus is structured over four weeks, culminating in a capstone project that puts everything into practice: 1. **Course Overview and Basic Principles of Financial Valuation Discounting**: The course kicks off with foundational concepts like compounding and discounting rates of return. You’ll learn how to determine the value of cash flows through the discounted cash flow (DCF) method, comparing it with other valuation techniques. 2. **How to Spend Money (Capital Budgeting Tools)**: The second week delves into capital budgeting decisions using vital tools such as Net Present Value (NPV), Internal Rate of Return (IRR), and Payback Period. Discussions on sensitivity analysis and spreadsheet modeling further enrich your learning experience. 3. **Measuring Cash Creation and Flow**: In the third week, participants explore financial statements to locate cash sources and uses. All roads lead to free cash flow, which is pivotal for understanding value creation and for forecasting cash generation in any business. 4. **How Much Does Money Cost (Evaluating the Cost of Capital)**: The final week shifts perspective, focusing on risk and return trade-offs. You'll learn how to estimate a firm's cost of capital and relate this back to free cash flows and valuation, tying all the concepts together. 5. **Capstone Case: Putting it All Back Together from Main Street to Wall Street**: The course culminates in a practical case study of Sunrise Bakery, where you apply your learned skills to evaluate investment decisions, forecast cash generation, and make comprehensive financial recommendations. #### Recommendations **Finance for Non-Finance Professionals** is an excellent fit for a wide array of learners: - **New Professionals**: If you're starting your career or have recently transitioned into a role that demands financial literacy, this course will equip you with essential skills. - **Business Owners**: Entrepreneurs can greatly benefit from understanding financial principles to make informed decisions about investing and managing their businesses. - **Non-Financial Managers**: For managers in marketing, operations, or HR, understanding finance can improve collaboration with finance teams and inform budget management strategies. #### Conclusion The course’s friendly and intuitive approach demystifies finance, making it approachable for anyone willing to learn. Its practical focus, combined with the clarity of explanations and varied examples, ensures that participants not only learn theoretical concepts but also how to apply them in real-world scenarios. By the end of the course, you’ll feel more confident in engaging with financial materials and making informed decisions that align with your organizational goals. If you’re ready to gain confidence in your financial acumen, consider enrolling in **Finance for Non-Finance Professionals** on Coursera—it could be a game-changer for your personal and professional development!

Syllabus

Course Overview and Basic Principles of Financial Valuation Discounting

Welcome to Finance for Non-Finance Professionals! In this section you will find general information about the course and instructions on how to navigate the course. For the first week of lectures, we will be covering the basics of financial valuation. We will start with the basics of compounding and discounting rates of return over time. Using these tools we will then move on to valuation using the discounted cash flow method. Along the way, we will demonstrate our valuation tools with a variety of practical examples and compare our analysis with other valuation techniques.

Welcome to the second week of Finance for Non-Finance Professionals! In this week of the course, we will build on the basic valuation tools from week one to start making capital budgeting decisions. Our capital budgeting review covers the basic tools like Net Present Value, Internal Rate of Return, Payback period, and return on capital. Our discussion of the relative advantages of each different tool leads us into sensitivity analysis and the advantages of spreadsheet modeling.

Welcome back to Finance for Non-Finance Professionals! In our third week together, we will go on a treasure hunt through the financial statements. Using discounted cash flows as our motivation, we search through the income statement and balance sheet for all the uses and sources of cash. Our search leads us to our primary measure of value creation: Free Cash Flow. Free cash flow will form the basis of most financial analysis and this module gives us a roadmap for estimating and forecasting cash creation within any organization.

Welcome back everyone! In our final week together in this course, we switch gears and take an external view of the firm from a Wall Street, or capital markets, perspective. We think about the basic tradeoff between risk and return, how to measure risk, and how to put a risk premium on different kinds of investments. We then take our analysis of risk and return and use it to estimate a firm's cost of capital. Finally, we circle back to free cash flows, capital budgeting and valuation to tie together all four weeks and get ready for our capstone case analysis.

In this final part of the course we bring all of our analysis to bear on a realistic case study. We will evaluate the investment prospects of Sunrise Bakery. As their CFO considers a large capital expenditure, she needs to think about the tradeoff between spending money today and generating more free cash flow in the future. Our job in this case is to forecast the amount of cash generation the new equipment will produce, discount the cash flows, and use all of our capital budgeting tools to make a sound financial recommendation.