Most financial analysis stops at ratios. This course starts where ratios stop: it teaches you to test whether reported earnings and cash flows can be trusted, to rebuild statements on a comparable basis, and to turn that work into a forecast and a recommendation you can defend in front of a credit or investment committee.
What you will be able to do
- Reformulate financial statements into operating and financing components and reconcile the three statements under real-world complications.
- Measure earnings and cash-flow quality, quantify the effect of accounting estimates and build your own adjusted earnings.
- Construct free cash flow correctly and explain the gap between EBITDA and cash.
- Decompose returns with advanced DuPont, ROIC and economic profit, and attribute margin changes to price, volume and mix.
- Benchmark against peers fairly by normalising earnings and adjusting for accounting differences, inflation and currency.
- Assess liquidity, debt capacity and covenant headroom, and run a liquidity stress test.
- Use distress and screening models properly, including their limits, and design an early-warning dashboard.
- Build, balance and govern a driver-based three-statement forecast with scenarios, sensitivities and variance attribution.
- Write a credit memo, an investment thesis and an executive report that reconcile competing indicators into a defensible conclusion.
Prerequisites
Comfortable reading IFRS or US GAAP financial statements; standard ratios (margins, turnover, liquidity, leverage); basic spreadsheet work.
What is included
- All 55 lessons with worked examples, original charts and diagrams, exercises with full solutions and knowledge checks.
- Module checkpoints, a 40-question final assessment and a capstone project with a rubric and model solution.
- Downloadable CSV datasets, progress tracking and saved assessment scores when signed in.
Not accredited; no CPE/CPD credit. Educational content only — not investment, legal or tax advice. See the Refund & Cancellation Policy.
