Free online courseCorporate Finance course

Course Description

Learn to think like a finance professional and make decisions with numbers you can defend. This free online corporate finance course guides you through the financial language used by companies, investors, and analysts, helping you move from reading statements to interpreting performance, planning growth, and evaluating value-creating projects.

You will build a clear understanding of how the balance sheet and income statement connect, why cash flow tells a different story than profit, and how taxes and working capital affect real business outcomes. Along the way, you will practice standardizing financial statements, applying ratio analysis, and using frameworks such as DuPont to diagnose what is truly driving profitability and return on equity.

As you progress, the focus shifts from reporting to forward-looking decision-making. You will learn how managers forecast with pro forma statements, estimate external financing needs, and think about internal and sustainable growth. Time value of money concepts are explained with practical applications, including perpetuities and loan amortization, so you can confidently translate future cash flows into today’s dollars.

The course also strengthens capital budgeting skills by walking you through project cash flows, depreciation effects, discounted cash flow logic, break-even analysis, and what-if thinking to support real-world decisions such as cost-cutting proposals. To round out the corporate finance toolkit, you will explore risk and return for stocks and portfolios, then connect those ideas to the cost of capital—estimating the cost of equity and debt and combining them into WACC to judge whether a project or strategy is worth pursuing.

Whether you are a business student, aspiring analyst, entrepreneur, or professional preparing for finance-focused exams, you will finish with a practical foundation you can apply immediately: interpret financial health, compare firms, plan scenarios, and evaluate investments with structured methods and confidence.