Finance and Accounting for the Nonfinancial Executive

Balance sheets and income statements. Cash flow and financial management. Many executives rise to positions of great responsibility with less knowledge of these finance and accounting basics than they’d like to have. Finance and Accounting for the Nonfinancial Executive will demystify the data, clarify key concepts, and teach you important frameworks and fundamentals.

This highly focused curriculum taught by Stanford GSB faculty will help you identify trends, make performance comparisons with competitors, and practice financial forecasting.

You’ll explore how much debt a company should accept, the appropriate analysis for better investment decisions, the measurement of the cost of capital, and the payment of cash dividends to investors. You will also take part in sessions designed to collaboratively review and reinforce these concepts to apply to your organization’s unique challenges.

How can you use numbers to make better corporate decisions? How can you effectively communicate the financial performance and value of your business? And how can you use finance and accounting to tell a compelling story about your company?

Finance and Accounting for the Nonfinancial Executive will help you do all of this with greater competence and confidence.

Below are just a few of the sessions you’ll attend as part of the program.

Study the mapping between underlying economic events and financial statements, and learn how this mapping affects inferences about future profitability and cash flows.

In particular, you will examine the construction of financial statements from transaction information and recognize the importance of judgment in accounting and its potential effect on financial statements.

A firm’s capital structure depends on its business goals, tolerance for risk and need for control. Identify the factors that must be considered in determining a firm’s optimal capital structure, and learn how the market reacts to changes in that structure.

The value of an asset is the value of the cash flows the asset will produce. The valuation of future cash flows is key to financial decisions by corporations and investors. Gain an understanding of how to evaluate projects based on the cost of capital and deriving the incremental changes in free cash flow.

The use of forecasted cash flow information and financial statements supports capital budgeting. Understand how to gather and use accounting and cash-flow information to make short-term and long-term managerial decisions.