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There’s a lot of uncertainty in the world right now, so much so that it can feel hard to tell your elbow from your appetite. But amid all the ups and downs of the recent news cycle, it pays to remember that finance and accounting professionals have remarkable tools and techniques for understanding what’s happening now and what could happen in the future.
To help you better use those tools, we took a deep dive into LinkedIn and found useful tip sheets for sharpening your forecasting and analysis skills.
Our usual disclaimer to the wise: You should always look for additional resources and expertise when doing complicated finance (or accounting) work because it can be difficult to accurately sum up sophisticated concepts in such a short space.
With that said, check out these useful accounting forecasting and analysis cheat sheets we recently found on LinkedIn.
- Bojan Radojicic: How to perform a forecast using an AI tool
While we’ve been talking about generative AI for years, organizations are still figuring out the best uses and risks of AI technology. Radojicic, a financial modeling coach and finance advisor, offers a lesson for finance and accounting professionals on performing an AI-based forecasting in a concise three-minute video presentation.
He demonstrates an AI forecast with step-by-step video examples. He also explains how to successfully prompt, how to export into Excel , and how to ask for visuals. - Christian Martinez: How to build a GPT for FP&A variance analysis
One of the advantages of generative AI is its flexibility. Martinez, finance transformation senior manager at Kraft Heinz, goes through the necessary steps for using a GPT builder to create your own customized GPT. Martinez writes that one of the benefits of creating a custom GPT is that it can “automatically analyze actuals vs. budget, forecast, and prior year,” which sounds like a real load of the FP&A team’s back.
Included in the presentation are screenshots of the prompts that Martinez used to create his own GPT, as well as tips for selecting the GPT model that works best for your needs and enabling the capabilities of the GPT. - Rahul Saxena: Financial ratios from CFA Level 1
Understanding the health and viability of businesses can be a challenge, especially with so much regulatory and economic uncertainty in the air. Saxena, who describes himself as an aspiring equity research analyst, explains different types of financial ratios that can help evaluate a company’s current and future performance.
Saxena offers definitions of different financial ratios, what each is best at measuring, and detailed explanations of how to perform those ratios. For example, he explains that activity ratio “measures how efficiently a company performs day to day tasks.” He lists different types of activities such as inventory turnover, payables turnover, and days of sales outstanding, and how to perform the ratio calculation. Saxena also explores other ratios including liquidity, solvency, coverage, profitability, valuation, segment, and performance.