Coming right after the Balanced Scorecard course, which was designed for and, by it's nature, targeted a broader audience, the KPIs course is the first one in a series going deeper into the key technical knowledge for a finance and accounting specialist and even for a financial analyst.
Trying to understand how a company is doing from financial point of view is a key skill and can be very beneficial for your career. Looking at multiple aspects that cover the complexity of any organization (sales performance, profitability, gearing, liquidity, investors perspective) will give you a broader understanding. Whether you are being paid to perform such an analysis, you do it out of your own initiative with the intent of presenting this to management or you just want to understand a company in which you want to invest, this course provides you with a good starting point.
When I have tackled the KPIs topic I had my own worries and doubts and I am trying to bring them forward in form of explanations for the audience. Questions like "is that the same or is different?", "what if it has another meaning?", "why are there three financial terms for the same concept?", "how do we interpret that?", "but what if ... ?" and so on are in the mind of anybody trying not only to memorize the concepts presented in this course but actually trying to understand in a logical way the information presented.
And last but not least you get the benefit of about 1h long analysis of a real company and it's official financial statements. And since it was originally done by someone else we also spot together the inconsistencies, potential mistakes, different understandings and approach of the original analyst. This, contrary to the classic thought theory, where the analyzed data is simplified and made up to match the theoretical concepts has also the advantage of not being split into bits and pieces but being a rounded analysis. There is, from my point of view a very large difference between an example telling you to calculate the gearing of a company, knowing you have to somehow get the "prior charge capital" and having that as such in a theoretical example and tiring to find out what is the interest bearing debt from a real P&L of a real company.
