This course provides an overview of financial analysis and valuation for businesses. Emphasis is on financial statement analysis, time value of money, management of cash flow, risk and return, different financial ratios and methods of valuation. This is intended to develop skills for the strategic analysis of financial performance, and to develop experience in evaluating ability of resources to create value as well as identify the risk of default. A company's financial report conveys a wealth of useful information about its business. indeed, financial reports are the primary means by which managers communicate company results to investors, creditors and analysts. These parties use the reports to judge company performance, to assess creditworthiness, to predict future financial performances, and to analyze possible acquisitions and take-overs. Users of financial statements must be able to meaningfully interpret financial reports and construct measures of financial performance.

To enable meaningful comparison across businesses or entities, accounting regulators have developed a set of standards and rules that provide guidelines to the reporting firms. Nevertheless, these standards and rules still allow managers considerable discretion in reporting the firm's results. Since company managers choose among a set of available accounting procedures when preparing their reports, we need to learn about accounting choices in order to achieve a thorough understanding of the reports and their links to the underlying business activity and economic reality of the reporting entity.