Friday 20 January 2017

Basic MS Excel

Module 1 – Overview and Basic Set up
  1. Introduction – Basic Overview of the Course
  2. Understand the Basic Layout and Setup of Excel
  3. Excel Interface
Module 2 – Data Manipulation and Navigation
  1. Navigation & Anchoring Cells
  2. Adding/Deleting Rows and Columns
  3. Hiding/Unhiding Rows and Columns
  4. Group/Ungroup Rows and Columns
  5. Merge & Center
  6. Copying Values, Formats, Comments… (Paste Special)
Module 3 – Formatting
  1. Basic, Number, Currency, Date and Custom formatting
  2. Fills, Fonts, Border and Alignment
  3. Conditional Formatting
Module 4 – Filters and Drop Downs
  1. Filters and Sorting
  2. Drop Downs
Module 5 – Basic Charting
  1. Line Chart, Bar Chart and Combination Chart
  2. Pie Chart
Module 6 – Basic Excel Functions, Formulas and Lookups
  1. Autosum Shortcut Key
  2. AND
  3. AVERAGE
  4. AVERAGEIF
  5. CHOOSE
  6. CONCATENATE
  7. COUNT
  8. COUNTIF
  9. DATE, EOMONTH, TODAY, YEAR & MONTH
  10. Vlookup and Hlookup
  11. IF
  12. IRR (Internal Rate of Return)
  13. Index, Match & Index Match
  14. Max, Min and Median
  15. NPV (Net Present Value)
  16. OR
  17. IF (OR and AND)
  18. PROPER
  19. ROUND
  20. SUM
  21. SUMIF
  22. SUMPRODUCT
  23. TRIM
  24. PMT
Module 7 – Niche Functions
  1. Pivot Tables
  2. Goal Seek
Module 8 – Self Evaluation
  1. Practice Test 1
  2. Practice Test 2

Advanced MS Excel

After completing MS Excel training course, students will be able to address the following questions:
  1. Understand the basic layout and setup
  2. Get familiar with important shortcuts
  3. Comprehend how to Cut, Copy, Paste, Hide, and Unhide data in rows, columns, and sheets
  4. Overview of Merge & Center
  5. Understand Text Alignment and Text Indent
  6. Learn Custom Formatting and Conditional Formatting
  7. Learn Basic/Advanced Charting – Pie charts, Combo charts, Waterfall charts, Gantt charts, etc.
  8. Understand how to make Pivot tables
  9. Understand Data Validation and Filters
  10. Know how to utilize Goal Seek to validate assumptions
  11. Protecting and Sharing – Cells, Worksheets, and Workbooks
  12. Learn basic functions, including Sum, Sumif, And, Average, Choose, Vlookup, Hlookup, Count, Countif, Max, Median, Sumproduct, Today, Eomonth, NPV, PMT, and IRR.
  13. Learn advanced functions, including Match/Index, Offset, String functions, Date and Array functions.
  14. Understand niche functions, including Etworkdays.Intl, Yield, Transpose, Forecast and Trend, Text, Mod, Db, Sln, Ipmt and Ppmt, Find, Len, Left, Right, Mid, and Mirr.

Finance for Non Finance Professionals

Course Objectives
After completing the course, students will be able to address the following questions:
  1. Understand the framework of Financial Statements – Income Statement, Balance Sheet and Cash Flow Statement
  2. Get familiar with the double-entry book- keeping system and journal entries
  3. Comprehend the impact of various business transactions on a company’s financials
  4. Describe financial jargon like working capital requirements, capex, shareholder’s equity, etc.
  5. Learn recognition of costs and revenue
  6. Understand complex topics covering fixed assets, inventory recognition methods, Accumulated Other Comprehensive Income, deferred taxes, marketable securities and long-term debt
  7. Develop a decision-making skillset using financial analysis
  8. Analyze a company based on ratio analysis
  9. Evaluation of investment projects – Meaning and Importance of Capital Budgeting, Techniques – NPV,IRR, Payback Period and ARR
  10. Comparison between NPV and IRR – Which is better and why?

Financial Modeling Course

Course Objectives
After completing the course, students will be able to address the following questions:
  1. Read and analyze financial statements
  2. Source information for building a comprehensive valuation model
  3. Understand the basic techniques of equity valuation
  4. Learn useful MS Excel functions and shortcuts referred to in building financial models
  5. Capture historical numbers from company filings
  6. Identify revenue drivers of any company
  7. Build a bottom-up revenue model
  8. Understand a top-down revenue model
  9. Build a fully integrated three-step financial model
  10. Build asset and debt schedules
  11. Plug the revolver facility in the cash flow statement to cover any deficit caused by an increase in the working capital
  12. Interlink the three financial statements to reconcile numbers and match the balance sheet
  13. Perform a Discounted Cash Flow analysis for valuing the theoretical price of any company
  14. Perform scenario and sensitivity analyses
  15. Perform ratio analyses and understand the different ratios and their interpretation
  16. Understand the process for identifying peer set of a company to conduct a relative valuation
  17. Understanding valuation using Transaction Comps
  18. Performing Football Field Analysis
Modules And Timelines
The program is divided into 3 modules:
  1. Financial Accounting and Valuation
  2. MS Excel
  3. Financial Modeling

OVERVIEW OF ACCOUNTING & VALUATION

  1. Overview of the income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow statement
  2. Overview of accounting adjustments like working capital changes, deferred revenue, DTA/DTL, etc. and their impact on the three financial statements
  3. Importance of equity valuation
  4. Techniques of equity valuation – DCF, Trading & Transaction Comparables
  5. Sum of the Parts Method (SOTP Analysis)

MS EXCEL

  1. Basic layout and shortcuts of MS Excel
  2. Basic and Conditional Formatting
  3. Basic Charting – Line & Bar charts, pie charts, combo charts etc.
  4. Pivot tables
  5. More than 30 Basic MS Excel functions like Logical functions, Reference functions, and Finance functions, which aid in building the model
  6. Goal seek and revolver

FINANCIAL MODELING

  1. Overview of the listed company and the sector used for the case study
  2. Data sourcing and creating historical financial statements
  3. Building a bottom-up revenue model
  4. Overview of the top-down model
  5. Building cost buildup
  6. Projecting of financial statements
  7. Building an asset schedule
  8. Building a debt schedule

FINANCIAL MODELING

  1. Projecting interest expense and dealing with the circular referencing error
  2. Revolver adjustment
  3. Interlinkage of debt and asset schedule with projected financial statements
  4. Completing the operating model

FINANCIAL MODELING

  1. Performing DCF analyses using the FCFF approach
  2. Performing Sensitivity analyses (single- and two-variable tables)
  3. Performing ratio analyses
  4. Valuation using Trading Comparables
  5. Valuation using transaction comparables
  6. Football Field Analysis

Advanced Financial Modeling

Advanced Financial Modeling (Investment Banking Course) Duration: 60 Hours, Fees : INR 20,000 plus service tax



Course Objectives
  1. Read and analyze income statement, balancesheet and cash flow statement
  2. Work on MS Excel and use efficient formula construction
  3. Use advanced MS Excel functions used at finance institutions to build dynamic templates
  4. Build a comprehensive financial model from scratch
  5. Identify revenue drivers and cost drivers using operating metrics
  6. Build a bottom-up and top down revenue projections
  7. Audit and fix circularity problems, iterations, and other reconciliation errors
  8. Source information from public filings and capture historical data
  9. Explicate the techniques, elements, and approaches of forecasting
  10. Apply the concept of discounted cash flow using FCFF and FCFE
  11. Calculate equity valuation multiples
  12. Build asset and debt schedules
  13. Plug the revolver facility in the cash flow statement to cover any deficit caused by an increase in the working capital
  14. Interlink the three statements to reconcile numbers and match the balance sheet
  15. Perform discounted cash flow analysis for valuing the theoretical price of any company
  16. Perform scenario and sensitivity analyses
  17. Perform ratio analyses and understand the different ratios and their interpretation & relevance
  18. Understand and perform trading/transaction comparable analysis
  19. Understand and walk through a simple LBO model (very popular in investment banking)
  20. Understand and build a project finance model to analyze feasibility
  21. Build a simple dashboard to capture the output
Modules And Timelines
The program is divided into 6 modules:
  1. Accounting and Valuation
  2. Advanced MS Excel
  3. Advanced Financial Modeling
  4. Project Finance  Overview
  5. Leverage Buyout Overview
  6. Mock test of Financial Modelling
The modules will be covered over 10 days

OVERVIEW OF ACCOUNTING & VALUATION

  1. Overview of the income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow statement
  2. Overview of accounting adjustments such as working capital changes, deferred revenue, and DTA/DTL, and their impact on income statement, balancesheet and Cash Flow Statement
  3. Importance of equity valuation
  4. Techniques of equity valuation – DCF. Trading & Transaction Comps
  5. Sum of the parts method (SOTP Analysis)

BASIC MS EXCEL

  1. Basic layout and shortcuts of MS Excel
  2. Basic and Conditional Formatting
  3. Basic Charting – Line & Bar charts, pie charts, combo charts etc.
  4. Pivot tables
  5. More than 30 Basic MS Excel functions like Logical functions, Reference functions etc which are widely used in client work
  6. Goal seek and revolver

EQUITY VALUATION MODEL

  1. Overview of the listed company and the sector used for the case study
  2. Data sourcing and creating historical income statement  and balance sheet
  3. Forecasting revenues using bottom-up revenue and top down approaches
  4. Building cost buildup
  5. Projecting of financial statements
  6. Building an asset schedule
  7. Building a debt schedule

EQUITY VALUATION MODEL

  1. Projecting interest expense and dealing with the circular referencing error
  2. Revolver adjustment
  3. Interlinkage of debt and asset schedule with projected statements
  4. Understanding common mistakes which happen during the linking process.

EQUITY VALUATION MODEL

  1. Performing DCF analyses using the FCFF approach
  2. Performing Sensitivity analyses (single- and two-variable tables)
  3. Performing ratio analyses
  4. Valuation using Trading Comparables
  5. Valuation using transaction comparables
  6. Football Field Analysis

ADVANCED MS EXCEL

  1. Advanced functions including Match/Index, Offset, Indirect, String functions, Date functions, and Array functions
  2. Understand niche functions, including Etworkdays.Intl, Yield, Transpose, Forecast and Trend, Text, Mod, Db, Sln, Ipmt and Ppmt, Find, Len, Left, Right, Mid, and Mirr.
  3. Regression analysis
  4. Advanced charting, including Waterfall chart, Dynamic chart, and Gantt chart
  5. Building switches to incorporate different scenarios

ADVANCED FINANCIAL MODELING

  1. Overview on Beta and its calculation
  2. Performing sensitivity analysis using 3D tables
  3. Circular error check and correction
  4. Auditing and methods to correct balance sheet differences
  5. What are investment banks and what do these banks do
  6.  Pitch books
  7. Mock Financial Modeling Test (2 hours) and its analysis to find out any weakness.

LBO MODEL

  1. Overview of the global LBO market, know-how, and characteristics of an LBO target
  2. Understanding the template to analyze LBO
  3. Building Sources and Uses table
  4. Allocating goodwill based on the purchase price

LBO MODEL

  1. Creating pro-forma balance sheet to adjust for deal assumptions
  2. Incorporating flexibility for different debt tranches
  3. Applying adjustments for cash sweep
  4. Performing LBO analysis using a case study

PROJECT FINANCE MODEL OVERVIEW

  1.  Overview of the project finance model
  2.  Understanding the template to analyze project feasibility
  3.  Building escrow adjustments, including Cash Reserve Escrow Account and DSRA
  4.  Incorporating adjustments for project phasing and government subsidy (if applicable)
  5.  Building Cash Waterfall to gauge cash flows from the project
  6.  Building Waterfall Distribution to gauge payoffs to investors
  7.  Building a robust dashboard to capture the output

Saturday 8 October 2016

Business Analyst’s Ten Key Roles and Responsibilities

Requirements are at the core of developing IT solutions. Defining, analyzing and documenting requirements evolve from a business analyst’s creative process, and are intended to show what a system can do.
Here are the business analyst’s 10 key roles in defining and managing requirements:
  1. Extract requirements - Requirements play a key part in engineering IT systems. Incomplete or improper requirements usually lead to project failure. A business analyst determines a project’s requirements by extracting them from business or government policies, as well as from current and future users, through interaction and research.
  2. Anticipate requirements - Skilled business analysts know how quickly things change in the dynamic world of IT. Baseline plans are subject to modification, and anticipating requirements that will be needed in the future or that have not yet been considered is essential to successful outcomes.
  3. Constrain requirements - While complete requirements are essential to project success, the focus must remain on core business needs, and not users’ personal preferences, functions related to trends or outdated processes, or other non-essential modifications.
  4. Organize requirements - Requirements often originate from disparate, sometimes opposing sources. The business analyst must organize requirements into related categories to effectively manage and communicate them. Requirements are sorted into types according to their source and applicability. Proper organization prevents project requirements from becoming overlooked, and leads to optimum use of time and budgets.
  5. Translate requirements - The business analyst must be adept at translating business requirements to technical requirements. This includes using powerful analysis and modeling tools to match strategic business objectives with practical technical solutions.
  6. Safeguard requirements - At regular intervals in the project life cycle, the business analyst safeguards or protects the business and user’s needs by verifying functionality, accuracy and completeness of the requirements against the original initiating documents. Safeguarding minimizes risk by ensuring requirements are being met before investing further in system development.
  7. Simplify requirements - The business analyst emphasizes simplicity and ease of use at all times, but especially in implementation. Meeting business objectives is the goal of every IT project; business analysts identify and avoid extraneous activities that do not solve the problem or help reach the objective.
  8. Verify requirements - The business analyst is most knowledgeable about use cases; therefore they continually verify the requirements and reject implementations that do not advance business objectives. Verifying requirements is accomplished through analysis, test, demonstration and inspection.
  9. Managing requirements - Typically, a formal requirements presentation, review and approval session occurs, where project schedules, costs and duration estimates are updated and the business objectives are revisited. Upon approval, the business analyst transitions into requirements management activities for the rest of the IT solution life cycle.
  10. System and operations maintenance - Once all requirements have been met and the IT solution delivered, the business analyst’s role shifts to maintenance, or preventing and correcting defects; enhancements, or making changes to increase the value provided by the system; and operations and maintenance, or providing system validation procedures, maintenance reports, deactivation plans, and other documents, plans and reports. The business analyst will also play a major role in analyzing the system to determine when deactivation or replacement is required.

Taking on the Indispensible Role of Business Analyst

Whether you currently work in IT or a related field, if you’re a leader in your organization and want the chance to pursue the incredible opportunities presented by the business analyst career path, now is a great time to research your options and start planning. With business analysis training, you can obtain the core skills that businesses need to advance – and you can advance to your full potential as well!

how facebook earning

Advertising Business

Facebook’s single most important revenue channel is advertising. The company has always been ad supported and most likely will always be ad supported. While some have claimed that Facebook will one day charge for access to the site, those rumors are completely false. Facebook generates over half a billion in revenue each year, the vast majority of which comes from advertising. So who is paying for advertising?

Self-Serve Facebook Advertising

-Social Times Ad-The largest chunk of Facebook’s advertising revenue is the company’s self-serve advertising platform. By visiting the following page you can set up your own advertising campaign on Facebook. These advertisements are displayed in the sidebar of most pages of the site. That includes user profiles, events, groups, Facebook Pages, and third-party applications. The primary advantage of Facebook’s self-serve advertising platform is the granular targeting features.
Over the past few years Facebook has increased their targeting capabilities, including the ability to limit advertising to metropolitan areas as well as the following target variables: gender, age, network (workplace, school, etc), profile keywords, relationship status, and more. Facebook recently released the Facebook Ads API which provides large ad buyers with the ability to build robust ad managers on top of the Facebook advertising platform.
We’ve written about a number of companies who have built services on top of Facebook’s Ads API. To boil it down, the Facebook Ads API enables Facebook to reduce the amount of friction large advertisers (those who spend more than $10,000 a day) have in posting new advertisements and modify existing ones. According to numerous sources, Zynga, the developer behind the largest games on Facebook (FarmVille, CafĂ© World, etc), is the largest purchaser of Facebook’s self-serve ads.
Small businesses like doctors, lawyers, restaurants, and others are also responsible for a large amount of Facebook’s revenue generated by the self-serve advertising platform. If you want to learn more about Facebook’s self-serve advertising platform, check out some of the articles below. We expect Facebook to generate somewhere in the range of $450 million this year (2010) on self-serve ads.

Engagement Ads

In addition to Facebook’s self-serve advertising product, Facebook also generates a substantial percentage of their revenue through their “Engagement Ads” product. Engagement Ads are Facebook’s solutions for large brand advertisers. Facebook places all engagement ads on the site’s homepage. Once a user logs in, they can interact with advertisements (like to one pictured to the right) which are placed on the right-hand side of the homepage.
Facebook has been ramping up their efforts to recruit brand advertisers in a number of ways but last September Facebook stepped up their efforts with the launch of Brand Lift. Brand Lift is essentially a product which enables large brand to test the effectiveness of their advertising campaigns almost immediately after their campaign is run. Facebook believes this increased level of measurement will encourage brand advertisers to spend more on Facebook Engagement Ads.
If you want to learn more about the Engagement Ads product, you can check out the articles below. We expect Facebook to generate around $250 million in brand advertising this year.

Microsoft Banner Advertising Agreement & Search

Previously, Facebook had an advertising agreement with Microsoft for displaying large banner ads on the site. Recently, Facebook removed the advertisements internationally and it appears that they could be completely phased out of the site by the end of the first quarter this year, according to a Facebook presentation that was presented in Poland earlier this month. Facebook is phasing out the banner advertisements from Microsoft as they want to be completely self-sufficient. Total revenue generated from Microsoft advertising will be less than $50 million this year as they phase out banner ads completely.
Another less discussed agreement is the one Facebook has with Microsoft over search. When Microsoft invested $250 million in Facebook at a $15 billion valuation, part of the investment included an agreement to integrate Microsoft’s search results into Facebook. The terms of the agreement have never been public however we believe that Microsoft may be paying Facebook beyond the terms of the initial agreement. Unfortunately for estimate purposes we have to assume that this revenue is negligible although we believe it to be worth at least $150 million a year.

Virtual Goods And The Gift Shop

Facebook currently generates a large amount of revenue from the Facebook Gift shop. For those less familiar with the gift shop, it’s a product which enables users to send virtual gifts to one another. At an average cost of $1 per gift, Facebook gifts have become an extremely lucrative business, generating upwards of $100 million last year. Facebook has been slowly opening up the gift shop to third-party developers in order to increase the variety of products sold through the shop.
In August of last year, Facebook began opening the gift shop to non-profits and by September it was opened to a number of other developers. During the ongoing Haiti crisis, Causes has been offering users the opportunity to purchase gifts which directly benefit victims of the tragedy. While there are few public estimates of Facebook’s gift shop revenue, we’d expect Facebook to generate upwards of $150 million from their gift shop this year.

Facebook Credits

That last way Facebook generates revenue is through their Facebook Credits program. Initially used as a way for Facebook users to purchase virtual goods through the Facebook gift shop, Facebook is slowly opening up Credits to third-party developers. The purpose is for developers of applications, like FarmVille and other large social games, to integrate Facebook’s Credits product directly into their applications.
Facebook will in turn take a large percentage of all virtual goods sold through applications. As we wrote in our 2009 Facebook Recap, Facebook has been testing a number of ways to integrate Credits. In addition to testing out alternative payments for Credits for those users without access to credit cards, Facebook has been testing user-to-user credits as well as in-application credit integration.
Facebook is widely expected to release the Facebook Credits product for developers at this year’s f8 developer conference being held in San Francisco this April. While it will only begin rolling out later this year, we expect Facebook to generate $150 million in revenue from their Credits platform this year. This could expand up to a few hundred million in a short period of time as the volume of virtual goods sold on Facebook grows beyond $1 billion a year.
Source:http://www.adweek.com/socialtimes/facebook-makes-money/313120