Advanced Financial Statement Analysis: Take a closer look

Are you interested in building deeper skills in analyzing accounting information and using that information to make smart financial decisions? Do you need to understand a company’s profitability? Are you interested in a firm’s growth in revenues and earnings, and how that growth drives share prices? Are you concerned with a firm’s risk? Do you want to be able to rigorously evaluate a firm’s financial statements, evaluate “accounting quality” and adjust the statements if you suspect earnings management? Will it be helpful for you to forecast and model a firm’s future earnings and cash flows, and then use those expectations to estimate share value?

These are questions of fundamental importance for professionals involved in equity investments, lending and credit risk assessments, mergers and acquisitions, corporate strategy and governance, consulting, and financial regulation. Companies’ reported financial statements provide a wealth of information to understand profitability, growth, risk, and value. But to unlock that wealth of information, you have to know where to look and how to analyze the numbers. The Advanced Financial Statement Analysis program will provide you with an analytical framework and practical tools to analyze and exploit information in corporate financial statements.

Financial reporting under IFRS and U.S. GAAP provides corporate managers with wide latitude in how they measure and report financial performance and position. Managers can use this latitude to inform or to mislead stakeholders. Past financial reporting scandals (e.g. Enron) reveal that managers who engage in earnings management or fraud can do enormous damage. Therefore, this program will also increase your ability to assess accounting quality, and detect and undo earnings management.

How you will benefit

• Analyze and use the information that firms report in balance sheets, income statements, statements of cash flows, and related notes
• Understand the types of accounting choices and estimates under IFRS and US GAAP that managers make in terms of their business strategy, constraints, and especially incentives
• Evaluate firms’ accounting quality, and test for the likelihood of fraud
• Know how to restate firms’ reported financial statements to undo earnings management, when needed
• Develop a better understanding of the types of red-flags to watch out for by analyzing the current financial statements of a company, with real-life case studies of several high-profile organizations
• Gain a powerful toolkit you can use to analyze financial statement data to assess firms’ profitability, risk, growth, and cash flows
• Develop a comprehensive set of methods and mechanics for forecasting firms’ future business activities, and measuring the expected effects of those activities with projected future balance sheets, income statements, and cash flows.
• Understand and apply various valuation approaches, including residual income valuation, discounted free cash flows, and market-based valuation multiples.