Week 1 Non-Finance Majors

Non-Finance Majors

This class is sometimes called "finance for non finance majors." We say this because our approach is to examine the aspects of finance that you should be familiar with no matter where you work in corporate management. Perhaps one day you might end up running things and then you would really need to know!

Our objective in this course is to bring you to a level of knowledge that will enable you to ask finance people to do things and to be able to interpret what they do.

In order to understand how to make financial decisions, we must cover some introductory topics today and in the weeks ahead:

• The role of the finance department in a business
• Issues of Ethics in Business (particularly finance)
• The basic goal of the firm
• Measuring the status of the firm; telling if things are good or bad (i.e., analyzing financial statements)
• Budgeting and Forecasting (i.e., predicting what's going to happen)