0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
Handy, 2008-04-28
I thought this book provides a lot of handy information without having to carry around smaller texts with less explanations or larger heavier texts with too much info.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Nice Handbook for Accounting students, 2007-02-20
The book is a nice handbook for students majoring in Finance and Accounting students. It has all the necessary explanations of the formulas along with good examples.As a person with some exposure to Finance and Accounting,I found the book to be extremely useful for students and pros in this field.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Effective refresher ... Efficient reference, 2007-01-06
I recommend this text to financial professionals I teach ... VERY helpful to clear the cobwebs several years after college!
40 of 40 people found the following review helpful:
Not just for students, 2002-05-27
This is a reprint of "McGraw-Hill Pocket Guide to Business Finance: 201 Decision-Making Tools for Managers" with a single difference. The now out-or-print book came with a runtime version of MathCAD and formulas for using each of the tools, while this new version does not. Also, don't let the title fool you - this book is as useful to working professionals as it is to students. The 201 tools contained in this small, highly useful book range from Acid Test (doing a quick ratio of financials) to Z-Scores. Each tool is listed alphabetically, its use explained, and instructions on how to use it is provided. What I particularly liked is the worked examples that accompany each tool.
As an IT consultant who specializes in service delivery this book is not one I would normally include in my professional library. I was introduced to it when a colleague and I were writing a white paper on recovery management. We were searching for a way to link business imperatives to justification for investment in recovery strategies. We found one piece of the puzzle in this book - the Altman Z-Score. This tool predicts whether or not a company is likely to enter into bankruptcy within one or two years. This led to the development of a copyrighted model that addressed survival level objectives, and also became a key part of the Tarrani-Zarate Information Technologies Management Model. All this from a single entry in a small book!
Aside from discovering a relatively obscure, but important, tool I also found other useful tools in this book. Because I am not a business consultant or financial expert the tools were like a cram course in financial management for non-financial people. For example, I was able to apply some of the tools to personal financial matters - the real costs of a loan become quickly apparent when you compute them. I was also able to employ some of the tools to conduct realistic cost/benefit analyses, examine trade-offs supporting approaches to projects, etc. In this respect this small book has significantly improved my professional skills and has inspired me to read other books on financial management.
I strongly recommend this book - collection of tools really - to anyone who deals with finance, anyone who has P&L responsibilities, and business and IT consultants. The latter group will find this book to be invaluable for developing proposals, deliverables and project plans that add value.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
GREAT!, 2002-01-11
This book saved me through four accounting courses three finance courses and two real estate courses. It is well organized and easy to locate any formula that is needed.