Business Analysis with Microsoft Excel

by Conrad Carlberg

Overview

Gain Deeper Insights, Make Smarter Decisions, and Earn More Profits

It’s time to put the full power of Excel quantitative analysis behind your management decisions!

Business analysis expert Conrad Carlberg shows you how to use Excel to perform core financial tasks all managers and entrepreneurs need to master: analyzing statements, planning and controlling company finances, making investment decisions, and managing sales and marketing. Carlberg helps you make the most of Excel’s tools and features in everything from business case development to cash flow analysis.

Becoming an Excel expert has never been easier. You’ll find crystal-clear instructions, real-world examples, insider insights, step-by-step projects, and much more. It’s all complemented by extensive web-based resources, from sample journals and ledgers to business forecasting tools.

·         Get more insight from income statements and balance sheets

·         Manage current assets and value inventories

·         Summarize transactions from journal to balance sheet

·         Analyze working capital, cash flow, statements, and ratios

·         Optimize budgeting and planning cycles

·         Make more accurate and useful forecasts and projections

·         Measure product or service quality

·         Plan investments, set decision criteria, and perform sensitivity analyses

·         Analyze profits, pricing, costs, contributions, and margins

·         Make better decisions in uncertain conditions

·         Understand and maximize the value of fixed assets

·         Efficiently import and export business data

·         Use Excel and Power BI to analyze data from QuickBooks or other sources 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780134862552
Publisher:	Pearson Education
Publication date:	12/17/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	576
File size:	36 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Conrad G. Carlberg is president of Network Control Systems, Inc., a software- development and consulting firm that specializes in statistical and database applications. He holds a PhD in statistics and is a many-time recipient of Microsoft’s Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award. He lives near San Diego, California.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Part I: Analyzing Financial Statements
• Chapter 2 Power BI: An Overview
• Chapter 3 Balance Sheet: Current Assets 
• Chapter 4: Valuing Inventories for the Balance Sheet 
• Chapter 5: Summarizing Transactions: From the Journals to the Balance Sheet 
• Chapter 6: Working Capital and Cash Flow Analysis 
• Chapter 7: Statement Analysis
• Chapter 8: Ratio Analysis 
• PART II   Financial Planning and Control
• Chapter 9: Budgeting and Planning Cycle
• Chapter 10: Forecasting and Projections 
• Chapter 11: Measuring Quality 
• PART III   Investment Decisions
• Chapter 12: Examining a Business Case: Investment
• Chapter 13: Examining Decision Criteria for a Business Case
• Chapter 14: Creating a Sensitivity Analysis for a Business Case 
• Chapter 15: Planning Profits 
• Chapter 16: Making Investment Decisions Under Uncertain Conditions 
• Chapter 17: Fixed Assets 
• PART IV  Sales and Production Analysis
• Chapter 18: Importing Business Data into Excel 
• Chapter 19: Exporting Business Data from Excel 
• Chapter 20 Using Excel 2016 and Power BI to Analyze QuickBooks Data
• Chapter 21: Analyzing Contributions and Margins 
• Chapter 22: Pricing and Costing

Editorial Reviews

The Barnes & Noble Review
A blank spreadsheet is like a chunk of granite: It can be sculpted into just about anything you desire. But if you want to use Excel for business analysis -- for maximizing profit -- it's not easy to find specific, real-world guidance. Fortunately, you just did.

Business Analysis with Microsoft Excel, Second Edition walks you start-to-finish through building the spreadsheets you really need as a businessperson. Better yet, it's supported by dozens of downloadable spreadsheets, making it supremely useful from the get-go.

Let's say you need to value your inventories, but you've purchased the same item at different times and at different prices. Conrad Carlberg shows you how to handle that. Need to develop a business case for a new product or service? Carlberg demonstrates how --- and also shows you how to introduce sensitivity analyses that handle the uncertainties the world might just throw at you.

You'll find easy-to-understand explanations of forecasting with Excel: starting from a useful baseline, working with moving averages, and using Excel's regression and smoothing functions, which Carlberg makes a whole lot easier than you might expect. There's even a taste of more advanced techniques, notably the Box-Jenkins ARIMA Approach, which gives you greater scope and flexibility than Excel's built-in functions.

Carlberg presents a full chapter on making pricing decisions with Excel: using absorption and contribution costing, working with contribution analysis (a tricky, oft-misunderstood technique), and estimating the effects of cross-elasticity -- the tendency of products to draw sales from one another.

If you simply want to learn Excel, there are plenty of excellent books. But if you want to use Excel to solve specific business problems, this is the one to choose. (Bill Camarda)

Bill Camarda is a consultant, writer, and web/multimedia content developer with nearly 20 years' experience in helping technology companies deploy and market advanced software, computing, and networking products and services. His 15 books include Special Edition Using Word 2000 and Upgrading & Fixing Networks For Dummies®, Second Edition.

bn.com

Carlberg (Ph.D., statistics), the president of a software and consulting firm that specializes in developing quality control and forecasting tools, distinguishes his book from others on Excel by its bottom line orientation. In coverage of financial statements and analysis, financial planning and control, investment decisions, and sales and marketing, he stresses making worksheets self- documenting for interpretation by others. Includes case studies, tips, a glossary, and auxiliary website. No date is given for the first edition. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews