Finance Data Analysis: Better Business Through Financial Management Course - Coventry University

Unlock the financial and organisational potential of a business with balanced scorecards and other strategic analysis tools.

Discover how data and financial information can be used to boost business

One of the primary challenges for any business is to make investment decisions that provide yield rates in excess of the cost of financing those investments. How can financial data be used to help a company and its employees to make sound decisions that will supercharge the business?

This ExpertTrack will show you how firms can create value through expert investment decisions and financial strategies.

You’ll have the chance to explore tools for assessing financial performance and the economic condition of an organisation, using the financial reports of real-world organisations. You’ll also be introduced to the key concepts of managerial accounting and explore how to identify relevant costs for short and long-term decision making.

Decypher financial reports from around your organisation

A strong understanding of your financial status is essential to running an effective and profitable organisation. You’ll have the chance to learn how to review statements of income, financial position, and further analysis. You can also get to grips with ratio analysis, liquidity ratios, and break-even analysis to be able to manipulate the core numbers from your reports.

Make sound capital investments in your organisation

Recognising good investment opportunities – and avoiding the bad ones – is a crucial business skill.

You’ll learn how to review capital investment details, calculate the different rates of return, and make informed decisions on the right investments to make.

FAQs:

Will this ExpertTrack cover what ROI (return on investment) is used for?

Yes. Return on investment (ROI) is a widely used financial metric that measures the likelihood of gaining profit on an investment. You’ll learn about this metric in relation to evaluating the return potential of a standalone or several investments.

Will I learn how to read a balance sheet?

Yes. You’ll build your understanding of what’s on a balance sheet, how it relates to business interests, and how to use the data within it for business decision making.

Key skills you will learn

• Industry analysis
• Liquidity and efficiency ratios
• Break-even analysis
• Investment decision making
• Working with financial statements, income statements, and cash flow statements
• Analysing company performance
• Investor ratios
• Capital investment
• ROI
• Financial data analysis
• Finance management
• Cost-profit analysis

ExpertTrack course overview

• Financial Statements Unlocked: How to Understand Corporate Finance and Financial Management Learn how to make better, more informed business decisions with an in-depth understanding of financial accounting information.
• How to Master Financial Statements: Financial Ratio Analysis and Interpretation Learn how to assess the health of a business with financial ratios, exploring profitability ratios, and fixed asset turnover.
• Break-Even Analysis Unlocked: How to Understand the Profit and Loss Statement Find out how to predict business profitability, the break-even point and the margin of safety with powerful financial tools.
• How to Make Better Capital Investment Decisions and Recognise Investment Opportunities Master the techniques of investment appraisals and long-term financial decision-making – from present value to compound interest.
• Divisional Performance Measurement: How to Achieve Operational Excellence Learn how to enhance the performance of divisional structures with the right operational and financial performance measures.

How ExpertTracks work

Join an ExpertTrack to master new skills in your chosen specialist area. Work through a series of topic-focused courses at your own pace, and pass the final assessment to earn a digital certificate award that proves your expertise.

World-class learning with

Coventry University

Coventry secured gold in the UK Government’s 2017 Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) and is the University of the Year for Student Experience in The Times & The Sunday Times Good University Guide 2019.

Start learning today - free 7-day trial

After your free trial you can:

• Pay $39 per month to keep learning online
• Have complete control over your subscription; you can cancel any time
• Work at your own pace and set your own deadlines at every stage
• Only pay while you’re learning; the subscription will cancel automatically when you finish
• Complete online assessments to test your knowledge and prove your skills
• Earn digital course certificates and a final award that you can share online, with potential employers, and your professional network
• Keep access to the content of courses you complete even after your subscription ends

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Meet educators from top universities and cultural institutions, who'll share their experience through videos, articles, quizzes and discussions.

The power of social learning: an effective way to learn

FutureLearn offers you a powerful new way to learn online. Every course has been designed according to principles of effective learning, through storytelling, discussion, visible learning, and using community support to celebrate progress.

Learning through storytelling

Each partner university has designed a complete learning experience, presented by leading academics in their field. Rather than broadcast long classroom lectures, ideas are introduced via high-quality videos and articles. You can then discuss what you’ve learned, testing your new knowledge with interactive quizzes that offer helpful responses and the opportunity to try again if an answer is wrong. Every course tells a story, step by step, with challenges and helpful tips along the way, to test and build your understanding.

Discussion for learning

We learn best when we share and debate ideas with fellow learners, to understand their different experiences and perspectives and to fill the gaps in our own knowledge. But not everyone likes being social, so rather than sending our learners off to separate discussion forums, you can add your comments alongside the content.

You can start by reading what other people have to say about the topic, and then join in when you’re ready. If you particularly like a comment, you can choose to follow its author so that you can easily find the people and comments that are of the most interest to you.

We’ll be building on these concepts of ‘discussion in context’ and ‘following’ over the coming months so that social learning feels less like a forced conversation and more like a chat with friends about your ideas and what you’ve learned.

Visible learning

One way to enhance learning is to make the process visible so that you know what is coming next, where you are in the course and how far you have come. The To-Do list gives you an overview of the course, showing the activities for each week, and keeping a record of what you’ve completed.

The profile page provides a summary of your own activity, including your courses and any comments you have made. We shall be extending these with further signposts for the course and indications of your progress.

Community-supported learning

An intensive tutoring model can’t work for massive-scale free courses, so we need to offer online support without a large network of tutors. The solution is to harness the power of the community, where learners can make immediate use of their newly acquired skills by sharing their knowledge with their peers.

Following other learners is part of a powerful system we are building that will allow you to acknowledge good contributions and promote people who offer helpful advice, and to develop your own reputation. In this way, success comes not just from passing an assignment and completing a course, but also from making a contribution to the FutureLearn community.

Massive-scale social learning

All these approaches need to work with huge numbers of learners so that comments don’t just flash past, and reputations can be built over time. That’s why we decided to create a new massive-scale social learning platform, drawing on expertise from The Open University, BBC, social media designers, as well as our FutureLearn partners. It’s a new way of learning.

Notes

Visible learning is inspired by the work of John Hattie, to find out more, visit visible-learning.org.

The community support model comes from Diana Laurillard’s work on conversational frameworks for formal learning.

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Learn for free, upgrade, or buy Unlimited

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Upgrade

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Introduce yourself

While you’re waiting for the course to start, you can fill in your profile page so that other learners can find out more about you. You can find your profile in the menu on the top right of the screen.

We’ll email you to let you know when the course starts. If you’ve signed up a long time in advance, we’ll also send you a ‘one month to go’ email, to help you prepare for the course.

Start the course

Once the course begins, a link will appear on Your courses dashboard. This will take you to the course ‘To do’ list, which will show you what to do next.

To do

FutureLearn courses are divided into weeks. These contain various activities that you should aim to complete within the week, each one built from a sequence of straightforward steps, to help you learn. Each week is given a descriptive name, so you always know what’s expected, and you can even navigate between them, to see what’s coming up, or catch up from the beginning if you’re late starting.

Videos, audio and articles

You can learn by watching videos, listening to audio and reading articles. Many of these steps are followed by short quizzes to help you check that you have understood.

Comments in the margin

Every article, video or piece of audio has a space to allow learners to comment and ask questions. This appears in the margin on large screens or is revealed below on small screens.

You can discuss topics with each other and educators will offer guidance and answer questions. Press the comment button to join the conversation.

Mark as complete

There is a switch at the end of each step that allows you to mark it as complete. This updates your ‘To do’ list, but leaving the switch off does not prevent you from moving on to the next step. If you’re not sure that you properly understood something, you can leave it and come back to it later.

Discussion

Every so often, you’ll come across a discussion step, where you’ll be given a topic to talk over with fellow learners. Talking about ideas is a really great way to learn and consolidate information, so give it a go, even if you find it daunting!

Activity

Want to find out what everyone is talking about right now? Go to the course activity page to see what questions you can help answer and which topics are under debate.

Replies

Once you start commenting, you’ll probably get replies from other learners. You’ll see these on the replies page. You’ll also get email notifications so that you never miss a reply.

Follow

Spotted somebody that is making interesting points and asking great questions? Press the ‘Follow’ button on their profile page and you can filter the discussions to include the people you’re most interested in. If someone follows you and you follow back, you can learn together.

Quizzes

Many activities will include a quiz, a moment to pause and check how well you’ve understood the key points from the previous video or article before moving on. The quizzes are not scored, you get an unlimited number of tries at each question and we give you feedback and hints on each go.

Tests

If you’ve upgraded your course you will be able to take tests. Tests work in much the same way as quizzes but tests are scored and are limited to three tries. These count towards your overall mark and are designed to test your knowledge. We’ll give you three points if you get a question right the first time, two on your second attempt and one on your third.

Assignments

Many of our courses also offer you the opportunity to do assignments and get feedback from other learners on the course. Each assignment will come with clear instructions about how to write or create your assignment, as well as give constructive feedback to others. It’s a great opportunity to put what you’ve learnt into practice and get tips on how to improve.

Completing the course

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If you haven’t upgraded you still have the chance to when you’ve finished the course. If you upgrade you will be able to go back and complete any tests in order to earn a certificate.

Choose the next course

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