You're a business owner, not a "numbers" person-but you still need a basic understanding of accounting and finance if you're going to stay in the black. StreetwiseFinance & Accounting for Entrepreneurs is the easy-to-understand primer you need to set up and maintain effective financial records. Streetwise Finance and Accounting for Entrepreneurs will give you a solid foundation and a basic understanding of accounting and finance. Author Suzanne Caplan covers everything from financial statements to understanding credits and debits and establishing budgets. This revised edition also includes strategies for rescuing a struggling business, and developing an exit strategy for selling or bequeathing your business. Includes advice on: Controlling costs Planning a budget you can stick to Organizing and maintaining your own books If you're not making and maintaining a budget, then you're not managing your business. With Streetwise Finance & Accounting for Entrepreneurs, you'll devise a startup budget as well as an operating budget. You'll learn to plan for growth and to use your budget to control costs. You'll read and create financial reports, profit and loss statements, balance sheets, and cash flow projections. No matter who does the actual record keeping for your organization, you need to know where the numbers come from, how they are reported-and what they mean to your bottom line. Streetwise Finance & Accounting is your key to knowing how much money you need for your business, where to get it, and how to manage it.
Any business person knows they need solid business skills to get on the fast track to success. However, when faced with a competitive job climate and business school costing as much as tens of thousands per year for an advanced degree, more people are opting for low-cost, quick ways to learn business fundamentals.
The U.S. government began standardizing and regulating financial reporting in 1929 when the stock market crash made it painfully clear that businesses often made absurd claims and that investors were either gullible, unable to verify information, or both. Now, financial reports are used by a company’s management to measure profitability (or lack of it), optimize operations and guide the company, by banks and other lenders to gauge the company’s financial health, and by institutional or individual investors interested in purchasing stock. Unless you’re financially savvy, annual reports with all those figures, frustrating footnotes, and fine print are boring and intimidating. However, once you have a fundamental knowledge of finance and its basic terminology, you can find the juicy parts. Reading Financial Reports For Dummies by Lita Epstein, a teacher of online financial courses and author of Trading for Dummies, gets you up to speed so you can: Go past the prose that can maximize the positive and minimize the negative and get information in dollars and cents Get an overview from the big three—the balance sheet, income statement, and statement of cash flows Understand the lingo and read between the lines Calculate basics like PE, Dividend Payout Ratio, ROS, ROA, ROE, Operating Margin, and Net Margin It pays for investors to be somewhat skeptical instead of gullible. Pressured to please Wall Street, companies are sometimes tempted to use “creative” accounting. You’ll discover how to: Detect red flags (that, unfortunately, aren’t emphasized in red) such as lawsuits, changes in accounting methods, and obligations to retirees and future retirees Understand the different reporting requirements for public companies and private companies with various types of business structures Analyze a company’s cash flow, a prime indicator of its financial health Scrutinize deals such as mergers, acquisitions, liquidations and other major changes in key assets Organized so you can start where you’re comfortable and proceed at your own pace, Reading Financial Reports for Dummies helps managers prepare annual reports and use financial reporting to budget more efficiently and helps investors base their decisions on knowledge instead of hype. Whether you’re in business or in the stock market, knowledge is always an asset.
Financial statements hold the key to a company's fiscal health—so learn to read them! In order to gauge a company's health—as well as the competition's—managers must know how to properly read and understand financial statements. The Business Owner's Guide to Reading and Understanding Financial Statements will introduce managers and business owners to various types of financial statements and explain why they are important. Serving as a desktop reference, especially for managers without a strong background in finance, this book will discuss the difference between internal and external financial statements and explain how they can be used for financial decision-making in order to avoid common missteps. Whether you're planning for major capital projects or simply managing the fiscal aspects of your department, this nontechnical, results-driven guide will arm you with the fundamentals to: Understand the budget process and why it is important Manage assets and track inventory Gauge profitability Monitor success throughout the year using internal reporting Set prices and make key cost decisions Financial statements are essential to determining a company's fiscal health. Understand where your company stands so that you can make informed decisions about its future.
Company financial reports are a key resource for investors, helping them uncover priceless information about a company’s profitability, or lack thereof, from the figures as well as through other non-monetary indicators. Details of lawsuits, changes in accounting methods, liquidations, and mergers and acquisitions can all be ways of detecting red flags if you know where to look. However the jargon and financial footnotes in financial reports can be difficult to decipher, and this For Dummies guide on the subject will help readers to understand company reports and make sensible investment choices based on publicly held information. Taking you step-by-step through the finer points of financial reports, this straightforward guide will help you get to grips with the most accurate way to wade through the numbers, judge a company’s performance, and make profitable investment decisions. This UK Adaptation focuses on the UK financial market, with the FTSE index as the focus of the book.
The friendly guide for retirees who want to get back into the workforce More than 76 million baby boomers will begin retiring in 2011. Eighty percent of boomers expect to continue working past the age of 65 due to financial and healthcare concerns (seniorcitizensguide.com, 1-06). Working After Retirement For Dummies shows retirees and workers approaching retirement age how to stay in the workforce and thrive after 65 or get back into the workforce after retirement. The book covers new job searching and resume writing; how to overcome employer myths about retirement age workers; and the flexibility of various career options from telecommuting to job sharing. In addition, it also covers nontraditional job search methods that work particularly well for seniors. Even retirement age workers who just want to volunteer their time will find helpful, straightforward advice on getting back to work at any age.
Being laid off is a traumatic event. Downsized workers must face decisions about reorganizing their lives and their finances, while grappling with the emotional grief of losing a job. This book is a practical guide to dealing with the tough questions a layoff poses. Using a week-to-week timeline, the book offers advice on such topics as: coping with grief and anger after a downsizing; reorganizing life after a layoff; how to launch a job search; balancing the job search with family and personal time; explaining a layoff to family and friends; and more. This book will show downsized workers how to reorganize schedules, set financial and organizational priorities, and go for their next job with confidence and enthusiasm.
Whether you're looking to buy foreclosed property as an investment-or as your dream home, The 250 Questions Everyone Should Ask About Buying Foreclosures provides you with the essential questions and answers including how to: Decide if a foreclosure purchase is right for you Learn the foreclosure rules particular to your state Find thousands of property listings before anyone else Place the perfect bid at auctions Buy properties during various stages of the foreclosure process Get an initial investment together This one-of-a-kind guide will explain everything you need to know to get in on-and profit from-this lucrative real estate opportunity. Lita Epstein, MBA, excels at translating complex financial topics critical to people's everyday life. She has more than a dozen books on the market, including The 250 Questions You Need to Ask to Avoid Foreclosure, Streetwise(r) Crash Course MBA, Streetwise(r) Retirement Planning, and Alpha Teach Yourself Retirement Planning in 24 Hours. She was the content director for the financial services Web site MostChoice.com and managed the site Investing for Women. She also wrote TipWorld's Mutual Fund Tip of the Day in addition to columns about mutual fund trends for numerous websites. She lives in Poinciana, FL.
How can you provide a financially sound future for your loved ones while avoiding estate planning or even making a will, unsure about how to effectively plan for the disposition of your assets? Estate planning is essential—no matter how much money or property you intend to leave to your heirs. In this handy Q&A guide, you’ll find answers to all of your questions about taxes, gifts, wills, will substitutes, and much more, including: What is a community property state? What are the disadvantages of intestacy? What is the fair market value of an estate? What is the generation-skipping transfer tax? With this book at your side, you can use the estate and tax laws and options to make sure you’ve made the best allotment of your property. And when you’ve done that, you can face the future with confidence, knowing your heirs and family are provided for.