We’re here to explain finance and how to communicate about the numbers. We’re going to do it in a way that some might say is a bit unconventional. We believe that finance is as much art as science. We won’t explain debits and credits. We won’t explain T accounts. We’ll only focus on what leaders, managers, and employees who aren’t in the finance division need to know to lead, manage, and work more effectively.

Your finance people may not tell you this, but really, finance is pretty simple. For the most part, it’s adding and subtracting. Occasionally we divide. It’s simply a question of knowing which pieces of data to pay attention to and how to combine them with others to find out what you need to know about the shape your business is in. We’ll keep what we share here that straightforward, but at the same time teach you all that you need to know about finance to understand what is going on in your company and in the news, at least from a financial perspective.

We’ll address questions like:

 
• Why the income statement is so powerful, and what you can learn from it

 

• How to manage using information in the balance sheet

 

• How profit and cash are different and why that is so important

 

• Why ROI analysis is key to decision-making and how to understand the data presented

Please email us any financial questions you’d like us to answer. We look forward to the conversation.

Read the whole story here, by Karen Berman & Joe Knight @ Harvard Business Publishing