Author: skillfinlearning

Skillfin Learning is a leading global online training provider for business, finance and consulting skills. The courses are very practical and full of real life illustrations to give you a flavor of what you can expect in the job. We have many courses that focus on business planning, finance, accounting and business valuation, Microsoft excel skills and data collection skills. All the courses have been designed and customized keeping in mind the professional demands of today’s world.

What Exactly Do You Learn in a Financial Analyst Training Program?

Financial analysts are forecasters. They are also budgeters, advisors, bookkeepers, and market observers. It is the responsibility of financial analysts to keep the company’s financial present on track and predicting the future to help with business decisions. Such responsibilities make the profile one of the highest paid jobs in the market with growth trends outshining many other positions out there. To become an expert analyst, you need the best financial analyst training. And typically, the best training program will focus on the following topics both from a theoretical and application-oriented angle.

  1. Financial accounting

The world of finances is spineless without accounting. Becoming privy with the language of finance, being able to write and understand the universally accepted accounting terminologies – these are necessary skills to start with any type of financial analysis of forecasting. The best training module will give you a managerial level overview of financial accounting. If not to the very depths, you will at least require intermediate expertise.

  1. Corporate financing

Assets, capital, shares, accruals, accounts payable, and receivable – you will come across such terms frequently when you sit with the financial statements of any company. And you need to know what exactly should you do with them. Whether you join an investment bank or a B2C company, you will be living and breathing corporate financing every day as a financial analyst. An essential subject to master before taking things to the next level.

  1. Financial modelling

How do financial analysts forecast the events of the market? Through financial modelling. Models take historical and currently available data into account to predict investible funds that will assure a capital return. You will learn about the popular modeling techniques, their involved nuances, and ways to predict results accurately by removing biases. Also, expect to develop a few technical skills like MS Excel.

  1. Business valuation

This is necessary for financial analyst training to fit you into the advisor role. Financial analysts are often called into merger and acquisition meetings to help decide whether a company is worth buying or not. They are also included in budgetary meetings to get an insight into the company’s current and expected financial position. Through business valuation skills, analysts can convert the intangible corporate parameters into solid figures and numbers and thus provide data-backed insights into the company’s core.

  1. Financial ratio analysis

Financial analysts are responsible for tracking important ratios like price to earnings, return on equity, and earning per share. Ratio analysis also helps to gain insights about liquidity, profitability, operational efficiency, and more. Your training will remain incomplete without an adequate discussion on financial ratio analysis and the skill to decode these numbers to compare multiple companies’ valuation in one spreadsheet. This advanced topic binds the other topics together with one axis.

So, look out for the above subjects while picking your online financial analyst training course. Search for more but do not settle for less. The best program will teach you from the very basic, maneuver expertly to the advanced levels and make you job-ready right after the certification course without the requirement of any other added modules.

5 Must-Use Online PowerPoint Training Tips for Creating Corporate Presentations

Corporate presentations need to be simple, yet elegant. They need to be consistent and crisp. You will lose your audience’s attention if you overload your slides with information or present data in an unorganized fashion. The cost of a poor corporate PowerPoint presentation is indeed massive. It can range from making ineffective business decisions causing revenue loss to you losing your job or a promotion opportunity. Hence, the following 5 PowerPoint features, taught in most  PowerPoint Training online,  are a must use in almost all corporate presentations. Without these, you will only have random texts besides random images that hardly make sense.

  1. Master slide design

The best PowerPoint training online begins with teaching the master slide design. This is how you maintain consistency in all your slides. You will surely have to place a logo on your slide. All the images must be of the same size and positioned exactly at the same corner. Will you place the logo one by one on each slide? Certainly not. Create one master slide. Design that. Whatever you create or place on that slide will be mirrored in the other slides that you place under it.

  1. Smart Art

As a professional, you certainly know the power of flowcharts. And Smart Art is the way to create them easily in PowerPoint. Sign in for those PowerPoint classes near me that contain Smart Art training as standard. PowerPoint is incomplete without it. The platform gives you a range of flowchart choices, starting from hierarchy to cycle to a pyramid. Simple create a bulleted list and hover over to Smart Art to convert that text into a visually-engaging organized flowchart.

  1. Slide Sorter

And speaking of organization, you need to frequently rearrange your content in your presentation. One information has to come precisely after another so that the entire story makes sense. The Slide Sorter feature under the View tab opens your entire presentation in an array form and shows 12 slides at a time on the screen. This gives you a bird’s eye view of all your slides. Rearranging becomes easy when you can see from the top.

  1. Embed YouTube Video

People try and fail to effectively copy a YouTube video directly on a PowerPoint slide and play it right there without ever leaving the presentation. With the right PowerPoint training online, however, you can do it without much fuss. The trick lies in copying the embed code of the YouTube video rather than the link itself. Then, the process is similar to inserting any other external video in PowerPoint. Think how much engaging can your corporate presentation become with YouTube videos playing on the slides!

  1. Resize multiple objects

Have you gone through the trouble of resizing multiple images on your slide yet? What do you do? Select one, resize and then select another and resize that? That messes up the consistency of your slide almost always, especially if you are using custom shapes. In PowerPoint, you can resize all the necessary items at the same time. The Format tab holds the secret where you need to select the required items with CTRL+A (or Command+A for Mac) and put in custom sizes under the Crop option. Done! All resize together.

5 Top Business Valuation Methods

Whether you are trying to sell your business or looking for new investors for fresh funding, you need to assess your business’ economic value. In simple words, you need a business valuation.

You may have already figured out that doing business valuation is not that simple, as you need to consider several factors within your business finances.

Business valuation analysts usually calculate the value of a business through some business valuation methods. In this post, we will talk about the top five methods.

  1. Asset-Based Valuation Method

An asset-based business valuation method takes into account the total net asset value of your business and then deducts its total liabilities.

Asset-based business valuation methods have two main approaches:

Liquidation Value

The liquidation value approach assumes that a business is not operational anymore, and its assets are liquidated. In this scenario, the business valuation occurs based on the net cash received after liquidating the business and selling the assets.

Going Concern

Businesses that plan to stay operational and have no intent to sell their assets should use the going-concern approach to evaluate their business. This formula considers the business’ current total equity, which is your assets minus liabilities.

  1. Market Value Method

The market value method is probably the most subjective approach to assessing a business’s value. This method works by determining the value of a business through a comparison of similar businesses.

Primarily, this method works well for companies that have enough market data about their competitors. This valuation method is an effective preliminary approach to have an insight into the potential worth of your business.

  1. Capitalization of Earnings Valuation Method

The capitalization of earnings valuation method computes the future profitability of a business considering its annual ROI, cash flow, and expected value.

This method is ideal for stable businesses, as the formula assumes that the earnings valuation for a single time period will continue. This way, the method determines a business’s current value on its future profitability.

  1. ROI-Based Valuation Method

An ROI-based valuation method evaluates the worth of an organization based on its profit and the return on investment (ROI) an investor may potentially receive for putting money into that business.

The ROI-method is a practical approach and provides investors with data about their potential return on investment even before they invest. However, a lucrative ROI eventually depends on market behavior, and that makes business valuation a subjective approach.

  1. Discounted Cash Flow Method

The discounted cash flow (DCF) business valuation method or the income approach determines a business’ value based on its estimated cash flow and adjust (or discount) it considering the present value. The DCF method is particularly useful if an organization’s revenues are not likely to remain consistent in the future.

Learn Business Valuation Today!

The business valuation is complicated, considering the various available methods to evaluate a business and determine its economic worth.

You can learn business valuation by enrolling in a leading online program that imparts training through its high-quality video content and expert mentors. Check for some courses here.

6 Jobs that Cannot Survive Without MS Excel

NovelAspect.com researched the listings on Indeed.com to find out the most sought-after skill by companies in 50 populous urban centers of the United States. Their study of 200+ business platforms showed that MS Excel topped the charts. Capital One and Burning Glass Technologies conducted another research to find out the productivity platform that helped executives improve their promotion chances. The answer was again Excel. As it stands now, most modern profiles cannot survive without Excel. Even when sophisticated platforms are already available in those segments, people are still flocking to Excel to get the job done. Here is a list of 6 such profiles. And as it goes without saying, an online Excel course is sufficient to land you in one and increase your promotion chances by almost 12%.

  1. Financial analyst

Financial analysis and MS Excel go hand in hand. Right from bookkeeping to financial modelling, these professionals live and breathe MS Excel, often tackling multiple worksheets at a time. Mastery of advanced Excel is required to work and thrive in this field and only those Excel training courses can get you started which integrates the platform with the profile. As of now, the demand for financial analysts is rising at a healthy 6% annual rate.

  1. Business analyst

If financial analysts use Excel to forecast investments, business analysts use Excel to predict productivity. Executives of this stream have to work with data from various departments of the company to ensure growth and expansion. The common tool that all wings can efficiently use is Excel. And again, advanced Excel helps business analysts to sit with all the available data and present their findings.

  1. Market research

The penetration of digital marketing has enabled ample data collection. Companies can now target their advertisements for specific groups of customers based on age, location, interests, and more. Such decisions are naturally taken by filtering and analyzing the collected data. And most market researchers achieve that feat using MS Excel. An intermediate online Excel course can make a proficient market researcher out of you.

  1. Auditor

Auditors go around verifying the books of companies to ensure that there are no anomalies in financial record keeping. If the records exist on Excel, having the skill in the arsenal becomes obvious. Along with the nuances of complicated accounting software, auditors must master MS Excel to perform simple yet productive tasks. It is difficult to verify numbers when the database does most of the job.

  1. Retail manager

Add warehouse manager to this stream as well. Be it monitoring inventory or maximizing efficiency and profit, all can be maintained and visualized on Excel. And most companies invest in Excel training courses to upskill their existing workforce to make them more productive. Unlike Amazon, small firms cannot afford costly retail or warehouse management software. For them, Excel is their savior.

  1. Project manager

Believe it or not but even project managers of top companies use MS Excel to navigate through data about their ongoing projects. Project management involves the tasks of resource allocation, interdepartmental interaction, communication with third-party vendors, and detailed report generation. The versatility of MS Excel facilitates all those responsibilities and speeds up daily operations.

To master Excel the best thing to do enroll for an online Excel course. This will help you to upskill and learn advanced Excel right from the comfort of your home.

The Pros and Cons of Discounted Cash Flow Model

 

Discounted Cash Flow analysis is like the ace-up-the-sleeve trick in equity valuation. The major assumption that money is worth more today than what it would be tomorrow makes the model a go-to tool for all financial analysts and investors. However, despite all its impressive results, DCF models also suffer from major drawbacks and analysts need to keep both the pros and cons in mind to extract the maximum success from the analysis. Just like a simple model can save time, too much dependency can be detrimental.

The pros of a discounted cash flow model

  1. It can be created in MS Excel

You do not need any complicated financial modelling software to create DCF. It is ultimately a cash flow statement of the future that delivers an idea about the present. MS Excel can capture the whole analysis with a simple set of functions and formulas.

  1. Intrinsic value is the outcome

In other words, you get an idea about how much you are to invest today to receive a particular return in the future. All the results are solid numbers with no scope for ranges. The returned intrinsic values in equity valuation, thus, simplify decision making and remove the requirement to compare companies.

  1. Captures business expectations

Discounted Cash Flow modelling starts with a few assumptions. And these assumptions encapsulate crucial business features like the history of growth, balance sheet strength, cash flow, prevailing market conditions and so on. Hence, you will not need to add further parameters on the end result as the major expectations are already captured by the model.

  1. Suitable for more analyses

Along with equity valuation, you can also use DCF to calculate the internal rate of return, other investment opportunities and potential of proposed mergers and acquisitions. In short, DCF modelling is a diverse skill to have.

The cons of DCF analysis

  1. Precision sensitive to assumptions

The outcome of a discounted cash flow model is as good as the assumptions you make. A small error here can return inflated intrinsic numbers. Plus, the sample size of your historical data may also cause large swings and often requires 50 years’ worth of information.

  1. Prone to overcomplication

DCF modelling in the inexpert hands can quickly turn into a perfect financial model that predicts very precisely. But the sheer number of assumptions combined with the term of the investment may make the Excel sheets a herculean task to maintain.

  1. Isolated picture

Equity valuation needs to take other businesses into account to adequately streamline resources. DCF has no scope of comparisons. The isolated picture may also create biases and lead to loopholes in decision-making.

Hence, although powerful, a discounted cash flow model demands a trained mind. A reputed online course can equip you with the steering techniques and transform you into a financial analyst with DCF expertise. Staying away from the cons requires rigorous practice and that is what you learn in good technical online courses.

What is Excel and The Advantages of Online Excel Courses

Microsoft Excel is one of the best applications available for generating spreadsheets. It has wide-ranging capabilities and is used across the world for data analysis, financial reports, and maintaining dashboards. The software was introduced in 1987 and since then has seen many upgrades. Microsoft Excel has become the most popular software used by businesses, professionals, homes, and schools.

No matter if you are a homemaker, a student or a CEO Excel Training Courses is a must for all. Many people are aware of the basic use of Excel but do not know that there are innumerable advanced ways of using Excel. Learning even a few of the advanced techniques of Excel can offer the user several powerful advantages. One can easily learn everything that Excel has to offer online.

Let’s find out a few advantages of online Excel Course:

1.      Increased Efficiency: Whether you are an employee or a student increased efficiency in sorting, analyzing, and storing information is always an added advantage. An employee who can organize and analyze data better can save a substantial amount of time and work smart.

2.      Efficient Planning: With Excel training courses learn how to analyze and identify patterns in large data. Faster analysis of data allows workers to easily summarize statistics for presentations and meetings. This leads to efficient planning and decisions.

3.      Better Jobs: With advanced excel training it’s easy to get into jobs like finance analyst, data analyst, data journalist, accountant, and even business planners.

4.      Increased Value: With online Excel classes learn skills that not many people know. As a result, you will have a competence that will make you unique from other employees, and this will, of course, be more appealing to employers.

Everyone is aware of Excel is a tool that is extensively used by finance professionals and also by sales and marketing professionals.  There are several other professions too that can gain immensely with Excel. Here are a few examples of the same.

Teachers. Gone are the days when a teacher could just go take a class, check a few copies and be back home to enjoy peace. Teachers are nowadays multi-task. They are responsible for creating and tracking lesson plans. School events, fairs, and trips are planned by them. Learning advanced Excel skills can make it simple and easy to track various details involved with these plans including student’s grades, event expenses, and seating plans.

Journalists.  These are the people who often need to accumulate large amounts of data or relevant stories, phone numbers of people, and the smallest of information.  Everything is vital for them. Advanced Excel skills make storing, organizing, and later analyzing the data very easy.

Photographers. With many leads and people to follow up for shoots and payments Excel training course can help in tracking information and leads with ease.

Doctors. Store all case studies in one sheet and take a look whenever needed. Keep a track of patients list and finances. The advantages are many.

This list can just go on and on for lawyers, writers, performers, students- Excel has something unique to offers for everyone.

No matter what or at what stage of a profession are you in there is always much to be gained with an online Excel Course offered by Skillfin Learning.