Speaking and understanding the language of finance are essential skills for leaders and managers throughout an organization; smart business decisions rest on this fundamental knowledge. Without a clear understanding of financial analysis and management, you lack credibility with finance managers and business leaders.
This certificate in financial management consists of courses that demystify financial terminology and concepts, giving you the tools you need to communicate fluently with finance managers and articulate business investment and project proposals to decision makers. Upon completion of the financial management program, you will have a solid foundation in finance that will serve you throughout your career.
Participants in this certificate need one of the following financial calculators to complete four of the required courses: Hewlett-Packard 12C or Texas Instruments BA II Plus. Both are available for purchase directly from Amazon.com. While waiting for the physical calculator to arrive, you may wish to try this online emulator of the HP 12C.
The courses in this certificate program are required to be completed in the order that they appear.
Managing a business means managing its financial resources, regardless of your job title. Your ability to make smart decisions about projects relies on your understanding of timelines and cash-flow calculations to track cash flow and payments, the value of securities and investments, and how to determine overall cost effectiveness. To do this, you need a good working knowledge of a number of financial concepts.
This course introduces you to those concepts and shows you how to perform important calculations using financial calculators and popular spreadsheet applications. You'll develop an intuitive understanding of the concepts and have a chance to practice applying the tools. You will come away with the tools to ensure that your company has the best possible chance of project success through managing its financial resources wisely.
* Participants in this course need one of the two financial calculators below.
Both calculators are available at most office supply stores and from a variety of online sources. There is also a Texas Instruments BA II Plus app for iPhone and iPad , which meets the calculator requirement for this course.
The key to financial success for any business is choosing the right projects to pursue at the right time, for the right price and with the right financing structure. Your role as a manager includes participating in decisions about which projects make sense for the company and are likely to return a profit.
To do so, there are six concepts you need to understand: net present value, internal rate of return, payback period, discounted payback period, profitability index, and equivalent annual cost. Non-financial managers need to be conversant in how each of these concepts work to be able to offer valuable insight and expertise.
Working through the examples in this course using both a financial calculator and popular spreadsheet applications will help you practice applying the tools and strategies, and will set you up to make project decisions that lead to growth and profitability.
* Participants in this course need one of the two financial calculators below.
Both calculators are available at most office supply stores and from a variety of online sources. There is also a Texas Instruments BA II Plus app for iPhone and iPad , which meets the calculator requirement for this course.
You are required to have completed the following course or have equivalent experience before taking this course:
Every financial decision a firm makes is a balancing act between risk and return. Funded projects can return significant revenue to the company. The risk is that the cost of the project may exceed the return, especially when the need to compensate capital providers is factored in. Being able to accurately assess both the risk and potential return of capital budgeting projects is an important part of your role as a manager.
Your work in this course will include learning how to calculate the hurdle rate, which is the minimum value a project must return, and then how to forecast the expected return. You will get to know the different asset classes and how to think about them in terms of the associated risks.
The tools from this course will help you measure risk and calculate the weighted average of the required returns as a way to ensure that your company chooses the right capital projects.
Your new project not only needs funding—it needs the right type of funding. You need to know how to choose between debt and equity funding, and when to consider acquiring funds from capital markets. These outside funding sources will have their own expectations for rates of return, and the cost of this funding is driven by a number of external factors such as the state of the economy and the industry.
Making sound capital budgeting and funding decisions is a vital part of your role as a manager, and this course shows you how characteristics of capital markets impact the process and prospects of raising capital. Learn how to observe external economic data, tips for developing strategies to balance debt and equity at your firm, and how decisions regarding corporate restructuring, mergers, acquisitions and bankruptcy are made.
These concepts, when put into action, will help ensure that you are maximizing the value of your firm using the correct balance of debt and equity.
Every property's finance function keeps detailed records of the daily transactions involved in the running the organization. Periodically, they create reports that allow management, stakeholders and regulating authorities to have insight into the financial health of the organization. As a manager, you need to understand both the metrics that are reported in income statement, balance sheets, and cash flow statements, and how they relate to each other. You also need to understand how comparing numbers across your company, the industry, and from year to year, can help you assess the overall financial performance of the firm.
The in-depth review of sample case studies in this course will provide you with the tools you need to examine your own property's reports. As you make budgeting and investment decisions, your knowledge of how vital financial markers indicate relative health in the organization will help drive initiatives to meet your company's financial goals.
A company's financial performance, and its ability to grow and thrive over time, can be assessed through ratio analysis, the basic evaluation tool for asset management, solvency and profitability. Whether you are managing the financial performance of a department, unit, or the organization as a whole, working with these ratios can help identify opportunities and allow you to make adjustments to improve performance.
As you become familiar with asset management ratios such as days sales outstanding and days to turnover, you will be able to apply these techniques in comparing your company's performance against others in the industry and against its own financial history. The ratio analysis tools you learn will help your organization to design and implement initiatives for increased productivity and profitability.
You are required to have completed the following course or have equivalent experience before taking this course:
Steven Carvell joined the Cornell University School of Hotel Administration’s finance faculty in 1986 and is currently a Professor of Finance in the SC Johnson College of Business. Over the past 33 years, he has taught undergraduate and graduate courses such as Advanced Corporate Finance, Capital Budgeting, Financial Strategy, and Investments. Dr. Carvell has also been an active teacher in executive education since 1990, working with almost every major domestic and international hotel company to create custom courses for hotel executives with companies like Hilton, Marriott, InterContinental Hotel Group, Taj Hotels, Jumeirah, Accor, Sol Melia, Le Meridien, Shangri La, and Peninsula. Dr. Carvell has also authored eight distance-learning courses through eCornell that are among the most widely demanded courses offered. He has held academic leadership positions at the School of Hotel Administration since 1999, serving as the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs from 2007 to 2016 and the Academic Director of the Pillsbury Institute for Entrepreneurship from 2013 to 2016.
Dr. Carvell has published numerous articles in academic and professional journals, including the Financial Analysts Journal, Journal of Portfolio Management, the Harvard Business Review, and the Cornell Quarterly, and he is the co-author of “In the Shadows of Wall Street.” His work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Forbes, Fortune, Institutional Investor, Financial World, and Leaders. Dr. Carvell has recently finished a major project designed to identify the determinants of hotel demand for U.S. hotels and another on economic and capital market antecedents of venture capital commitments. He is currently working on a project to disaggregate hotel room rates within urban markets and another to determine the risk-return characteristics of hotel room rates in major U.S. markets. Dr. Carvell is also involved with evaluating the effectiveness of hotel company business strategies using strategic benchmarking and economic value-added analysis.
Dr. Carvell has worked for professional money managers in the area of applied strategy in the equity market and served as a consultant to the Presidential Commission on the 1987 stock market crash. His consulting interests include valuation and risk analysis in feasibility studies, hotel debt capacity, strategic benchmarking, and corporate and financial strategy.
