Finance and Budgeting Essentials for Business Professionals
Course Description Overview
Good financial judgment can deepen the decision-making skills of any business professional. Fluency with monetary figures helps you tie everyday operations to the financial success of your organization at a department and senior level.
Finance and Budgeting Essentials for Business Professionals grounds you in the functions and tools of finance. In this course, you will examine financial statements—including the balance sheet, income statement, cash flow statement, and statement of stockholders' equity—as guides to fiscal health. You will also identify what you want to gain from a budget and describe the steps of budgeting to meet these goals.
In this course, you will use financial information to interpret and preserve the financial health of an organization.
You will:
- Describe the importance and major elements of financial statements.
- Use balance sheets to determine the assets a company has at its disposal.
- Interpret income statements to identify corporate earnings, expenses, and profitability.
- Read cash flow and other statements to assess an organization’s real-world financial situation.
- Select a budget type and method to fit the needs of a company.
- Prepare a responsible budget.
To ensure your success, we recommend you have some level of work experience in any of a variety of organizational settings. You should also have general end-user computer and Internet skills. You may wish to take the following United Career Career Campus course or have equivalent knowledge:
- Using Microsoft® Windows® 10
We also recommend you have basic familiarity working with spreadsheets. You may wish to take one or more of the following United States Career Campus courses or have equivalent knowledge:
- Microsoft® Office Excel® 2016: Part 1
- Microsoft® Windows® 10
- Microsoft® Office Excel® 2016
- Microsoft® Office Word 2016
- Microsoft® Windows® Calculator
- Any PDF reader
- An Internet browser (e.g., Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome™, Mozilla® Firefox®)
For this course, you will need one computer for each student and one for the instructor. Each computer will need the following minimum hardware configurations:
- 1 GHz or faster 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
- 1 gigabyte (GB) RAM (32-bit) or 2 GB RAM (64-bit)
- 16 GB available hard disk space (32-bit) or 20 GB (64-bit)
- CD-ROM drive (if installing any software from a CD-ROM)
- Keyboard and mouse (or other pointing device)
- 1024 x 768 resolution monitor recommended
- Network cards and cabling for local network access
- Internet access (contact your local network administrator)
- Printer (optional) or an installed printer driver
- Projection system to display the instructor's computer screen
Lesson 1: Reviewing Financial Basics
Topic A: Identify the Benefits of Finance
Topic B: Describe Financial Statements
Lesson 2: Interpreting Balance Sheets
Topic A: Identify Elements of Balance Sheets
Topic B: Analyze a Balance Sheet
Lesson 3: Interpreting Income Statements
Topic A: Identify Elements of Income Statements
Topic B: Analyze an Income Statement
Lesson 4: Interpreting Other Financial Statements
Topic A: Read Cash Flow Statements
Topic B: Read Statements of Stockholders’ Equity
Topic C: Read Notes to Financial Statements
Topic D: Identify Elements of Financial Statements for Non-Profits
Lesson 5: Planning a Budgeting Approach
Topic A: Describe Budgeting Principles
Topic B: Choose What and How to Budget
Lesson 6: Utilizing Budgets
Topic A: Prepare an Operating Budget
Topic B: Prepare an Activity-Based Budget
Topic C: Monitor a Budget