This is a book for businesspeople. All decisions in a business organization are made in accordance with how they will affect the organization’s financial performance and future financial health. Whether your background is marketing, manufacturing, distribution, research and development, or the current technologies, you need financial knowledge and skills if you are to really understand your company’s decision-making, financial, and overall management processes. The budget is essentially a financial process of prioritizing the benefits resulting from business opportunities and the investments required to implement those opportunities.
An improved knowledge of these financial processes and the financial executives who are responsible for them will improve your ability to be an intelligent and effective participant.
This book is special for a number of reasons:
1. It teaches what accountants do; it does not teach how to do accounting. Businesspeople do not need to learn, nor are they interested in learning, how to do debits and credits.
They do need to understand what accountants do and why, so that they can intelligently use the resulting information— the financial statements.
2. It is written by a businessperson for other businesspeople. Throughout a lifetime of business, consulting, and training experience, I have provided my audiences withdown-to-earth, practical, useful information. I am not an accountant, but I do have the knowledge of an intelligent user of financial statements. I understand your problems, and I seek to share my knowledge with you.
3. It emphasizes the business issues. Many financial books focus on the mathematics. This book employs mathematical information only when it is needed for the business decision-making process.
4. It includes a chapter on how to read an annual report that helps you use the information that is available there to better understand your own company. This chapter also identifies a number of other sources of information in the public domain about your competition that may be very
strategically valuable.
5. It includes information on how the finance department contributes to the profitability and performance of the company. The financial staff should be part of the business profitability team. This book describes what you should expect from them.
6. It contains many practical examples of how the information can be used, based upon extensive, practical experience. It also provides several exercises, including a practice case study, as appendices.
