Excel-Based Business Analysis: Forecasting Key Business Trends

Abstract

“The trend is your friend”is a practical principle often used by business managers, who seek to forecast future sales, expenditures, and profitability in order to make production and other operational decisions. The problem is how best to identify and discover business trends and utilize trend information for attaining objectives of firms.This book contains an Excel-based solution to this problem, applying principles of the authors’ “profit system model” of the firm that enables forecasts of trends in sales, expenditures, profits and other business variables. The program, called FIRM, which runs on Windows with Microsoft Excel 2010, useshistorical time series of total sales, total costs, and total assets of the firm from its financial statements (income statements and balance sheets), estimates relationships among these variables, and then employs the estimated relationships to forecasts trends in these vital business variables. Featuring step-by-step case examples, the goal is to equip business managers and students with easy-to-use tools for understanding and forecasting trends in important business variables, thereby empowering them to make better business decisions.