A financial manager has a number of different ways to look to see if a company is successful or is faltering. These tools help them make sure the company is on the right course. The Manager will look at a couple of things like how the profits are doing, is the quality control up to standard, is there an fall in sales, why is there a fall is sales?, are clients paying there bills on time?, are the accounting practices efficient, so on and so forth. We can go on and on with this. Using the same questions as stated above we can flip it around and ask if the company is being successful or not.

Real world example: Konica Minolta has not been weathering the storm that is covid that well but then again a lot of business hasn’t. As stated above a financial manager needs to look at if customers are paying their bills on time….well what do you know people are because the economy has been on a stand still. WELL, since customers aren’t paying their bills and KM is paying the sales commissions on machines being sold, KM has decided not to pay us til they get paid. Fair enough. However when you differ payments for 120 days, and then expect sales people to go out to get new business…you got us all messed up.

This has been a great course. Challenging at times but also really fun as I love math and Excel so I really loved the weeks we had to work the problem sets and figure out the numbers. I very much appreciate the Excel tool kits as they helped tremendously in the course and I have saved them for future reference in case I ever need them.

I enjoyed learning about financial statements and how the different financial ratios can help you determine a company’s strengths and weaknesses. I also found the topics of risk management very interesting and how much risk tolerance a company or individual may have. I also really valued the team assignments. I worked with a great group of people who got things done efficiently and we collaborated well. Working with a team can definitely be a challenge and not always something I look forward to but they made this a great experience.

Finally, I learned some key indicators to look for in a business that is in distress or doing well. I am hoping I can use some of the knowledge learned in future investments when I am looking for the right investment to buy and for finding the right company at the right time. Thanks for the insightful posts and great discussions. I also very much appreciated the videos that broke some of the topics down in a much easier way to understand