My #74 course certificate from Coursera

Understanding Financial Statements: Company Performance
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

This course mainly focuses on Income Statement and Statement of Cash Flows, both help you gain a boarder perspective and answer the important question: “How does the company perform?”. This is beginner level course, so only basic line items are introduced: revenue, cost of goods sold, expenses…, but enough to get you ready to read annual reports.

Cash flow is trickier than it looks on the statement; besides operating activities, there are also investing and financing. Time value of money, discount rate, taxes, all of which are behind the scene. So I recommend you enroll a course on Corporate Finance, if you find it interesting.

Another merit of the course is it keeps emphasizing on the importance of Notes and Auditor’s Report. Besides the brain-dumbing numbers and figures, these are the crucial components make a financial statement real “financial statement”. It is thrilling that there are interviews and you can learn from top-gun experts in the industry.

Finally a performance measuring technique called “ratio” is introduced. Only basic concepts are taught, but which open the gate to let you go to the next level: decision-making. From here on, you need to pursue other Corporate Finance courses.

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I am Kesler Zhu, thank you for visiting my website. Checkout more course reviews at https://KZHU.ai