Welcome to Know Your Numbers 1. The purpose of this course, is to provide you with a solid analytical foundation to build your MBA on. Numbers play a critical part in your life as a manager, and a key skill for you to develop throughout your career, will be the ways in which you analyze and interpret them, as well as to use them for making value-generating decisions for your organization. In the first week, we will link technical financial concepts to every day activities in your business. By introducing the basics in this context, you'll be able to start building rapidly upon this, and to gain numerical skills that will complement your growing managerial toolkit. From here, you'll be able to integrate these into your strategic and tactical decision-making processes, in order to optimize the value of your organization. All the way through, we remain focused on what business problems we're trying to solve, and what decisions we're hoping to support in the process. To do this, we explore the topic of ratios and data, why and how. While traditional accounting, and even MBA courses, are flooded with various financial ratios, the fact is, that there are far too many to simply memorize, and be expected to recite at the most appropriate time. By turning this concept on its head, we focus instead on understanding why we want to measure a particular trend, and then we move toward, how we should go about doing that. The following topic is strategic management accounting, this may seem like a strange concept at first, but quickly, you will appreciate that the role of even a management accountant can be far more than just number crunching. In fact, when armed with the knowledge of the value drivers of a business, as well as the surrounding concepts that are likely to influence these, the traditional tasks of cost accounting and breakeven analysis, suddenly shift into enablers of strategic and competitive advantage. No exploration of financial concepts would be complete without paying some mind to notions of both budgeting and forecasting. While anyone can make up a budget simply by copying and pasting what happened last year, this is hardly going to add any value to a business, much less setted up sustainably for the future. An introduction to financial modeling comes next. Equipped with the basic forecasting skills for the future, we are now able to explore financial management concepts, and the ways in which variances in cash flows at particular points in time, can either be an unexpected windfall, or an unwelcomed challenge to the financial health of our business. Our final topic in this course addresses business realities and links to Praxis. Throughout the course, we focus on the areas in which best practices can serve as useful tools to develop our business. We take stock at this point to consider the circumstances under which firms, well-meaning, and otherwise, have failed to do this well, or even at all. The purpose of exploring this in some detail, is to bring us back to some human elements of management, that present challenges to what otherwise may begin to seem all too easy. At the conclusion of all of these topics, you will have gone through a good first pass at some crucial processes, as well as solving some common problems with innovation, and creativity. We hope you will find this to be an engaging and exciting topic to explore, whether you have no numerical background at all, or already consider yourself a wiz. I look forward to working with you soon.
