This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.

Corporate finance is usually taught as a set of formulas, which leaves the impression that the job is arithmetic. Accounting does the arithmetic.

The actual job is two questions, and both answers get argued with

Where does the money come from, and where does it go. That is the whole discipline. Everything else — the models, the ratios, the discount rates — exists to make those two answers defensible in a room where several people have opinions and one of them controls your budget. Which is why finance people who only know the formulas lose those rooms: they can calculate a net present value but cannot explain why this project and not the other one, or what happens to the cost of borrowing if the rating slips a notch.

What this course covers

Forty lessons, arranged the way the money moves. The function first: the role and the structure around it, working with the board and the auditors, strategic planning and forecasting, currency and interest rate risk, preventive against detective controls, and the numbers that show whether any of it works — the cash conversion cycle, free cash flow, break-even, return on capital. Then deals and price: acquisition strategy and why most of them fail, due diligence, valuing a target, forms of payment, integration afterwards, budgeting and the rolling forecast, setting targets without a budget at all, and nine approaches to pricing including elasticity. Then money in: capital budgeting with net present value and payback, cash forecasting and cash gaps, investment policy across deposits, commercial paper, the money market, government debt and bonds, raising money through debt via factoring, leasing and long-term loans, and raising it through equity via angels, venture capital and crowdfunding. Then how it looks from outside: credit ratings and the process behind them, the arguments for and against going public, how an offering works, the exchanges, delisting, the quarterly earnings call, the road show, interim reporting and earnings per share, employee stock plans and options. Then a budget built from the line items up, with market benchmarks and a return calculation behind the request. Then cost management as a discipline: reading a large recurring bill, allocation and chargeback, reserved capacity, unit economics, and a ninety-day rollout. Finally the environment: STEEPLE, Porter's five forces, the Boston matrix, inflation, interest rates, central banks, regulation, international institutions, and what demographics do to a business plan.

Two blocks were recorded for a support-function audience

The budgeting block builds the budget of one specific function down to individual line items, and that is exactly why it is here — corporate finance courses rarely show a budget being assembled from the bottom, with market benchmarks and a return calculation attached to the request. The technique is the same whichever department you are building it for. The environment block has a departmental angle in one lesson of eight; the other seven are macroeconomics, regulation and competitive analysis with no industry attached. The cost management block was recorded around cloud spending, which is a specific category rather than a universal one — the allocation, chargeback and unit economics machinery transfers to any large recurring cost, the examples do not.

Who is teaching this

I am Mike. I built the people system at Preply as it became a unicorn, and I have worked at Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank. More than 1.6 million students have enrolled in my courses across 185 countries, and over 150,000 specialists have gone through my programmes. I hold PHRi and SHRM-CP certifications and represent HRCI in more than ten countries.

What is included

• Lifetime access to all 40 lessons

• Active instructor support in the Q&A section

• A Udemy Certificate of Completion

• Working material: the net present value and payback methods, the due diligence checklist, the debt and equity instrument maps, the rolling forecast, the budget build-up with benchmarks, the cost allocation models, and the unit economics structure

• Twenty lessons on the finance function itself, rather than a chapter on it

Where to start

Take the last spending decision above your signing limit that you were asked to support. Write down the argument you actually used. If it was "it is in the budget", that is the gap this course closes. Enrol now and start today.