Finance for Non-Finance Professionals
Course Information
Course Introduction
The importance of financial statements cannot be over-emphasized as, at the end of the day, the affairs of any business would be represented in Dollars and Cents by way of financial statements. Sales, Operation and HR Managers must, thus, understand and be able to analyse and interpret them for the purposes of analysis, budgeting, costing and reporting.
This 1 day course seeks to give the participants an understanding of what financial statements are all about – their uses, structure, format, contents and the key elements of financial performance indicators.
Learning Outcome
Participants will, after this module, feel more comfortable when faced with a set of financial statements. Financial statements can be very informative. At the same time, they can also be quite meaningless and even misleading, depending on whether one is able to read them beyond the figures shown. This course will take participants through discussions and exercises on both the qualitative and quantitative analysis of financial statements.
Course Outlines
Topic 1: Financial statements - what are they?
Topic 2: The different types of financial statements
Topic 3: Uses and users of financial statements
Topic 4: Limitations of financial statements/ shortcomings of financial statements - why you should be very careful when reading them
Topic 5: The Annual Report - what it contains
Topic 6: Structure / format and contents of Financial Statements:
- the Balance Sheet
- the Profit & Loss Statement
- the Cash-Flow Statement
Topic 7: Qualitative analysis - establishing how reliable the statements are
Topic 8: Quantitative / ratio analysis ( of key financial performance indicators)
- types of ratios
- calculating the ratios
- interpreting the ratios
- comparing the ratios ; rule of thumb, trend analysis, industry comparison
Topic 9: Using cash flow projections and costing as a management tool
Topic 10: From the concept of cash flow, understand what is time value of money and how to do capital budgeting using tools based on time value of money.
Trainer's Profile
Ms. Koh Siew Min
Koh Siew Min leads a team in providing financial consultancy and training to banks, MNCs and management institutes in the Asia-Pacific region. In addition to possessing a degree in Accountancy from the National University of Singapore, Siew Min is also a qualified Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA, USA). She taught Corporate Finance as well as Bank Financial Management for the Master in Financial Management by University of London (“UOL”). She has also been teaching banking and finance courses for the UOL at the Singapore Institute of Management since 1995 (teaching Financial Management/Corporate Finance, Principles of Banking, International Financial Management). These courses cover treasury risk management, corporate risk management and use of derivatives. She was in the adjunct faculty with the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore (teaching Commercial Bank Management, Corporate Finance, Investment Analysis and Portfolio Management etc). She also teaches Commercial Bank Management and Credit Lending Decision for the University of Canberra. In the above capacities, she teaches subjects covering retail and corporate bank management, loan packaging and monitoring, credit evaluation, investment analysis and corporate finance, analysis of financial statements and international financial management, amongst others.
Her broad exposure in the banking sector involved working with bank branch network and top executives of client organisations across a variety of industries. Her areas of specialisation covers retail banking, investment analysis and portfolio management, financial management and credit management.
Siew Min has delivered trainings to large organisations : Keppel Land Ltd, KPMG, Hewlett – Packard, Intel, BPP Asia, Ministry of Finance, Accountant General Dept, MINDEF, SingTel, Motorola, Institute of Banking and Finance, Premas International, Chartered Semiconductors, Courts, Nomura Singapore Limited, Thai Village Holding Ltd, Flextech Holding Ltd, Institute of Certified Public Accountants of Singapore (ICPAS), Citibank, Institute Bank- Bank Malaysia, Bank of China, OCBC Bank, Southern Bank, Bank Mandiri and Standard Chartered Bank (Jakarta). Siew Min is bilingual in English and Chinese and she conducts programs in Mandarin for China participants in a variety of banking subjects. She brings to her training programs a unique blend of academia and practical industry experience in banking and finance gleaned from years of research, teaching and business management in the sector.