Accounting and Finance for IT professionals (Coursera)

This course presents an introduction to the basics of financial accounting and finance for IT professionals. The first part of the course will focus on understanding the most important financial statements, namely, the balance sheet, the income statement, and the statement of cash flows. We will then focus on how we can understand the financial health and performance of the company by examining a number of important financial ratios that are derived from the financial statements of the company. The second part of the course will focus on the basics of finance.

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This includes the concept of time value of money, discounting cash flows, and capital budgeting. The course will also introduce the idea of real options, how they affect a project’s NPV, and their impact of the decision to accept/reject a project. Lectures on concepts will be supplemented with numerical examples.

Course 3 of 6 in the Business Technology Management Specialization.

Syllabus

WEEK 1

Basics of Financial Statements

This module provides a brief introduction to financial statements and various common filings. These are the most important sources for obtaining information regarding a company's performance. Most strategies are indeed based on financial statements. After completing this module you will be able to get the important details from the balance sheets.

WEEK 2

Financial Statement Analysis

The purpose of this module is to equip you with the skills required to identify accounting information required for building trading strategies. After completing this module you will be able to calculate the key financial ratios.

WEEK 3

Time Value of Money

In this series of videos,we will cover the basics of time value of money. This includes the idea of discounting and compounding of cash flows and why they needs to be done. We will see how to calculate the present and future values of various types of streams of cash flows like annuities and perpetuities. Finally, we will discuss the relationship between risk and discount rate and what type of risk drives the discount rate.

WEEK 4

Capital Budgeting

In this series of videos, we will cover the various aspects related to deciding whether to accept or reject investment in a project. This starts off by discussing the common decision tools, namely, net present value (NPV), internal rate of return (IRR) and payback period (PBP) and how to calculate and interpret them. We will then move on to what free cash flows are and how to estimate them. Finally, we will focus on the flexibilities in projects, how to value them and how they affect the decision to accept or reject projects.

Business Technology Management Specialization