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Let’s say you’re an IT professional or a mechanical engineer. Do you really need to pick up finance skills?

Yes, you do.

Just because you’re a non-finance professional is no excuse for you not to learn finance.

Noticed those smartly dressed men and women on CNBC, Bloomberg and Fox Business? They are financial analysts, and among the best paid professionals in the industry. So you want to become a financial analyst too? Great! Here’s what you can expect.

Millennials are the best educated generation ever. Most young people these days have a college degree; many have a Masters in their chosen field, some have an MBA and a few even have PhDs.

An average Millennial by the time he or she is 32, will have been in at least four different jobs.

Financial literacy is absolutely essential for entrepreneurs and business founders. Most entrepreneurs are aware of this, but as a survey by Intuit Canada shows, there is a big gap between what entrepreneurs should know about finance and what they really know.

Have you ever seen a Financial Statement of a company and left wondering what is it all about?

For professionals who don’t come from an accounting or finance background, it can be quite overwhelming as such.

In one our earlier blogs, we discussed how to create an Index/TOC sheet in an Excel workbook.

Don’t recall? No worries, read it again here.

Got it now. Great!

As an Entrepreneur, you often have to negotiate on your company valuation.

This is especially true when you are looking to raise new funding from investors.

To get your funding, you need to mutually agree on the potential valuation of your company.

Microsoft Excel can be a great tool for visualization purposes. There are some very powerful charts functionalities inbuilt in Excel, that can be used to depict numbers visually.

Let us look at some of those interest charts that are already available to use at the click of a button.

When we want to do valuation of any company using the Discounted Cash Flows valuation, we need to calculate a cost of capital.

The cost of capital is simply the expected return that investors (both debt and equity) 

You may have worked on an Excel workbook with just 3 or 4 worksheets in them.

In those workbooks, navigating between worksheets is relatively easy.

Right?

As a financial/business/valuation analyst, many times we have to spend a considerable amount of time trying to find the VALUE of companies.

There are many different aspects of value – different terms get used synonymously and often causes a lot of confusion.

Lets say you are creating a PowerPoint presentation for a meeting.

The meeting is about to start in next 5 mins.

You review the final presentation once before putting it up on the big screen.

And guess what – you realize there is something that you forgot to do.

The last few years have been anything but dull. The economic cycle has turned for good, the technological disruptions are happening at a faster pace than ever, the money is getting poured into electric cars, self-driving cars, artificial intelligence like anything.

Gives you a clear picture of what the world would eventually look like, only questions unanswered are how and when.

To learn the specific credit analysis skills, you can check out our online course here.

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If you have ever looked at the Balance sheet of large companies, you would often find this line item Minority Interest on the liabilities section.

They look something like below:

James joined his dream company, directly after graduation. He was full of energy and enthusiasm and proud to be working for such a reputed name. However, all of this died down as he started struggling to complete the tasks that he was assigned with. He wasn’t given time to learn on the ground and was expected to perform from day one.