--- title: Financial Management description: Financial management is the planning, directing, and controlling of a company's financial resources. Learners will understand how to read financial statements, allocate capital, manage budgets, and make strategic decisions to ensure the long-term profitability and stability of an organization. category: business-entrepreneurship subcategory: entrepreneurship difficulty: beginner, intermediate, advanced url: /subject/entrepreneurship-financial-management --- # Financial Management Financial management is the planning, directing, and controlling of a company's financial resources. Learners will understand how to read financial statements, allocate capital, manage budgets, and make strategic decisions to ensure the long-term profitability and stability of an organization. ## Available Resources 3 Books • 4 Courses • 5 Websites ## Websites ### 1. Corporate Finance Institute (CFI) Commercial training provider whose public library holds free Excel templates, valuation and accounting explainers, and sample models alongside paid FMVA certification courses. The free material suits building practical modeling vocabulary; the certifications themselves require payment. **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/ **Tags:** financial modeling, Excel templates, valuation, accounting, certification ### 2. Aswath Damodaran's Website Aswath Damodaran's NYU faculty page, hosting his lecture slides, webcasts, valuation spreadsheets, and annually updated datasets on equity risk premiums, betas, and cost of capital by industry. The data feeds real discounted cash flow work. **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/ **Tags:** valuation, cost of capital, equity risk premium, datasets, DCF ### 3. SCORE Financial Templates Downloadable Excel workbooks from the SBA-backed mentoring nonprofit covering financial projections, startup budgets, and cash flow. After filling one in you will have a three-year projection a bank or investor can actually read. **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://www.score.org/resource/template/financial-projections-template **Tags:** financial-projections, small-business, cash-flow, budgeting, templates ### 4. Khan Academy Finance Khan Academy's free finance and capital markets course of short videos on interest and debt, housing, inflation, taxes, financial statements, stocks and bonds, retirement accounts, banking and derivatives. Gives beginners working intuition for everyday money decisions and how securities markets operate. **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://www.khanacademy.org/economics-finance-domain/core-finance **Tags:** time-value-of-money, interest-and-debt, inflation, stocks-and-bonds, financial-statements, capital-markets ### 5. hbr.org Harvard Business Review (hbr.org) offers research-based articles, case studies, and practical guidance on leadership, strategy, and organizational performance for managers and executives. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://hbr.org **Tags:** websites, business-entrepreneurship, business-fundamentals ## Courses ### 1. Finance for Non-Finance Managers This course is for non-financial professionals, managers, and business leaders seeking to understand core finance and accounting concepts to drive organizational growth and impact financial decisions. You will gain a basic understanding of finance and accounting principles, enabling you to analyze financial information and assess the impact of your decisions across functional areas. Specific topics include financial analysis, planning, forecasting, budgeting, cash flow management, and strategic financing. You will learn to apply these concepts through practical exercises, potentially leveraging tools like Microsoft Excel for financial analysis and forecasting. Upon completing this course, you will be able to: 1. Explain the importance of finance and interpretation of financial information. 2. Apply accounting and finance concepts to analyze financials. 3. Understand key accounting and finance terms. 4. Examine financial statements using key ratios. 5. Explain the importance of the budgeting process. 6. Learn key components needed to improve profitability. To be successful in this course, no prior finance or accounting background is required. **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://www.coursera.org/learn/finance-for-non-finance-managers **Tags:** financial-statements, budgeting, financial-analysis, managerial-finance ### 2. Corporate Finance Essentials This Corporate Finance Essentials course provides a foundational understanding of key financial concepts relevant to companies, investors, and capital markets. You'll learn to interpret financial news, master essential financial vocabulary, and understand core accounting principles. No prior knowledge required. By the end of this course, you will be able to analyze company financial statements, understand basic investment strategies, and apply financial principles to business decision-making. This knowledge will be invaluable for your career in finance or accounting. Limited free materials available. **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Language:** English | **Duration:** 7 weeks of study, 2-3 hours/week | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://www.coursera.org/learn/corporate-finance-essentials **Tags:** courses, business-entrepreneurship, finance ### 3. Finance for Non-Finance Professionals This short course surveys all the major topics covered in a full semester MBA level finance course, but with a more intuitive approach on a very high conceptual level. The goal here is give you a roadmap and framework for how financial professional make decisions. We will cover the basics of financial valuation, the time value of money, compounding returns, and discounting the future. You will understand discounted cash flow (DCF) valuation and how it compares to other methods. We also step inside the mind of a corporate financial manager and develop the basic tools of capital budgeting. We will survey the how, when, and where to spend money, make tradeoffs about investment, growth, dividends, and how to ensure sound fiscal discipline. Our journey then turns to a Wall Street or capital markets perspective of investments as we discuss the fundamental tradeoff between risk and return. We then synthesize our discussion of risk with our valuation framework and incorporate it into series of direct applications to practice. This course requires no prior familiarity with finance. Rather, it is intended to be a first step for anyone who is curious about understanding stock markets, valuation, or corporate finance. We will walk through all of the tools and quantitative analysis together and develop a guide for understanding the seemingly complex decisions that finance professionals make. By the end of the course, you will develop an understanding of the major conceptual levers that push and pull on financial decision making and how they relate to other areas of business. The course should also serve as a roadmap for where to further your finance education and it would be an excellent introduction of any students contemplating an MBA or Finance concentration, but who has little background in the area. **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Language:** English | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://www.coursera.org/learn/finance-for-non-finance **Tags:** courses, business-entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship ### 4. Financial Management Capstone **Author:** Jeff Flesher Capstone of the University of Illinois Financial Management specialization. Learners analyse a company using public financial data, evaluate an acquisition scenario and build investment models, producing a financial management plan that applies capital budgeting, financing and valuation techniques to business decisions. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://www.coursera.org/learn/financial-management-capstone **Tags:** financial-management, capital-budgeting, corporate-valuation, financial-analysis, acquisitions ## Books ### 1. Financial Management: Theory & Practice **Author:** Eugene F. Brigham, Michael C. Ehrhardt Graduate-level corporate finance textbook covering valuation, cost of capital, capital budgeting, capital structure, and risk analysis, with spreadsheet models throughout. Working the problems builds the quantitative fluency expected in corporate finance and treasury roles. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid **Link:** https://www.amazon.com/dp/0324224060?tag=edmonddante07-20 **Tags:** books, business-entrepreneurship, finance ### 2. Financial Intelligence for Entrepreneurs **Author:** Karen Berman, Joe Knight Plain-language guide to reading income statements, balance sheets, and cash flow statements, and to the estimates and assumptions hidden inside them. Aimed at founders who need to interpret their own numbers and question an accountant's. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid **Link:** https://www.amazon.com/dp/1422119157?tag=edmonddante07-20 **Tags:** books, business-entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship ### 3. Profit First **Author:** Mike Michalowicz Proposes a cash-management system for small businesses: allocate revenue into separate bank accounts, taking profit first and running operations on what remains. Gives owners a concrete bookkeeping routine rather than a theory of accounting. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid **Link:** https://www.amazon.com/dp/0960028315?tag=edmonddante07-20 **Tags:** books, business-entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship --- *This content is part of Dantes.io - Your Treasure Map to Knowledge* *Curated by humans at Dantes.io. Personal study use welcome; republishing this curation requires permission (team@dantes.io).* View this page online: https://dantes.io/subject/entrepreneurship-financial-management