Building Financial Models with Microsoft® Excel®: A Guide for Business Professionals, Second Edition

Preface

PURPOSE OF THIS BOOK

Building Financial Models with Microsoft Excel is a step-by-step comprehensive guide to the process of building financial models using Microsoft Excel. I designed and wrote this book with the specific goal of making you an advanced financial model-builder using Excel. This is neither an accounting/finance textbook nor a "how to use Microsoft Excel" book. Rather, this book represents a real-world guide to using a powerful tool (Microsoft Excel) to accomplish a complex task (building a financial model). When you are finished reading this book, you should have a firm understanding of the steps involved in building financial models and you should know how to use Excel to put that understanding to work in the form of a working financial model.

A financial model is a quantitative representation of a company's past, present, and future business operations. Companies of all types and sizes use financial models every day to analyze and plan their business activities. Financial models serve as the foundation and basis of standard financial accounting reports, including the Balance Sheet, the Income Statement, and the Statement of Cash Flows.

This book contains step-by-step instructions for building a financial model. As such, this book can serve as either a tutorial or a reference. It is my hope that this book helps to demystify the process of building a financial model.

Microsoft Excel is a powerful application for the collection, analysis, and presentation of data ...