Finance & Quantitative Modeling for Analysts Specialization

How can you put data to work for you? Specifically, how can numbers in a spreadsheet tell us about present and past business activities, and how can we use them to forecast the future? The answer is in building quantitative models, and this course is designed to help you understand the fundamentals of this critical, foundational, business skill. Through a series of short lectures, demonstrations, and assignments, you’ll learn the key ideas and process of quantitative modeling so that you can begin to create your own models for your own business or enterprise. By the end of this course, you will have seen a variety of practical commonly used quantitative models as well as the building blocks that will allow you to start structuring your own models. These building blocks will be put to use in the other courses in this Specialization.

The simple spreadsheet is one of the most powerful data analysis tools that exists, and it’s available to almost anyone. Major corporations and small businesses alike use spreadsheet models to determine where key measures of their success are now, and where they are likely to be in the future. But in order to get the most out of a spreadsheet, you have the know-how to use it. This course is designed to give you an introduction to basic spreadsheet tools and formulas so that you can begin harness the power of spreadsheets to map the data you have now and to predict the data you may have in the future. Through short, easy-to-follow demonstrations, you’ll learn how to use Excel or Sheets so that you can begin to build models and decision trees in future courses in this Specialization.

Basic familiarity with, and access to, Excel or Sheets is required.

In this course, you’ll explore how financial statement data and non-financial metrics can be linked to financial performance. Professors Rick Lambert and Chris Ittner of the Wharton School have designed this course to help you gain a practical understanding of how data is used to assess what drives financial performance and forecast future financial scenarios. You’ll learn more about the frameworks of financial reporting, income statements, and cash reporting, and apply different approaches to analyzing financial performance using real-life examples to see the concepts in action. By the end of this course, you’ll have honed your skills in understanding how financial data and non-financial data interact to forecast events and be able to determine the best financial strategy for your organization.