Financial Planning & Analysis

This course explores the use of financial information for internal planning, analysis, and decision-making. The main objective of the course is to equip you with the knowledge to understand, evaluate, and act upon the many financial and non-financial reports used in managing modern firms. Managing any modern firm requires information about the firm’s products, processes, assets, and customers. This information is a key input into a wide range of decisions: analyzing profitability of various products, managing product-line portfolios, setting prices, measuring and managing profitability of customers, making operational and strategic decisions, evaluating investments, guiding improvement efforts, and so on. The focus of this course is on modern internal-reporting systems. We will discover that many firms do not provide their managers with useful information; we will see numerous examples of value destruction and bankruptcies caused by this. We will also investigate some modern ideas in how an organization’s internal information system should be designed to enhance value creation; and we will see how world-class firms take advantage of their competitors’ internal-reporting mistakes. To attain the right level of understanding, we will briefly explore the mechanics of the many techniques used to prepare internal reports. But the emphasis in this course is very much on interpretation, evaluation, and decision-making. We will examine the following key topics: ▪ Designing managerial information systems to support an organization’s strategy. ▪ Determining which financial and non-financial metrics are necessary for success in various competitive environments. ▪ Evaluating profitability of products, services, assets, and customers. ▪ The capabilities and the limitations of various reporting systems in guiding value-maximization, cost-control, and improvement efforts. ▪ The limitations of traditional cost-estimation systems. ▪ Activity-based costing and activity-based management. ▪ Estimating and managing the costs of capacity resources. ▪ Relevant costs and relevant revenues in business decisions. ▪ The information necessary to evaluate long-term business decisions. ▪ The incentives created by various performance-evaluation techniques.