My Skill Lab
FinanceIntermediate

Corporate Finance Essentials

How companies decide where money goes.

Taught by Pooja Adhikari · CFA, Equity Analyst

What you'll learn

  • Discount and compound cash flows correctly using present and future value, including annuities and perpetuities.
  • Build an NPV and IRR analysis for a multi-year project and interpret which one to trust when they disagree.
  • Run a full capital budgeting screen using NPV, IRR, payback, and the profitability index on incremental free cash flows.
  • Estimate a company's cost of equity with CAPM and blend it into a weighted average cost of capital (WACC).
  • Reason about the debt-versus-equity trade-off and explain how leverage and the tax shield change firm value and risk.
  • Manage working capital through the cash conversion cycle and evaluate a dividend or buyback decision.

About this course

Every business runs on a handful of money decisions: which projects to fund, how to pay for them, and what to do with the cash that comes back. This course gives you the working toolkit of corporate finance — time value of money, NPV and IRR, the cost of capital, capital structure, working capital, and dividends — explained plainly and worked through with real numbers so you can defend a decision in a meeting, not just pass a quiz.

Course content

8 lessons
  1. 1The Time Value of MoneyWhy a dollar today beats a dollar tomorrow, and how to move money across time.Preview
  2. 2Net Present Value: The Decision RuleTurning a stream of project cash flows into a single go/no-go number.Preview
  3. 3Internal Rate of Return and Its PitfallsThe project's own rate of return, and when it can mislead you.
  4. 4Capital Budgeting in PracticeRunning the full screen on a real project's incremental free cash flows.
  5. 5The Cost of Capital and WACCEstimating the rate that turns cash flows into value.
  6. 6Capital Structure: Debt vs EquityHow the financing mix changes value, risk, and the cost of capital.
  7. 7Working Capital ManagementKeeping cash moving through receivables, inventory, and payables.
  8. 8Dividends, Buybacks, and Payout PolicyDeciding what to do with the cash a business generates.