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Ask HN: What are some good resources to learn business administration/finance?

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Re: Ask HN: What are some good resources to learn business administration/finance?

#71

Post by gen220 »

znpy wrote: post #64
gen220 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would like to strongly second your recommendations regarding accounting. Double entry accounting is the root of all finance. If you understand it well enough to keep accurate accounts of your personal finances (credit cards, 401k, salary, pre/post-tax expenses, etc), you understand it well enough to fumble through a financial statement. I’d plug GNU Ledger, but really any double entry accounting software is good to…

What's the opinion about gnucash?

Big caveat that I’ve never seriously tried using it, but my perspective is that GNUCash and GNU Ledger have different target audiences. The way I think of it is (Cash is to LibreOffice) as (Ledger is to some combination of Vim and SQLite).

Cash aims to replace non-free accounting software, Ledger is both a file format and a general purpose tool for parsing and transforming that file format, that is designed for accounting but can be used to drive a wide variety of applications.

Re: Ask HN: What are some good resources to learn business administration/finance?

#72

Post by john4534243 »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #56

Software engineer with an MBA here. I didn't have a bachelor's degree, got into coding as a hobby and turned it into a career. I needed a degree to put on my CV. All the hard problems I'd encountered weren't in the technology (99.9% of business coding is simple), so learning more CS wasn't actually going to help that much. So I took an MBA (they accepted my board experience as good enough to not require a bachelor's,…

No offence. In my experience Software engineer with an MBA is a person who had found coding is not a skill that suits them.

Re: Ask HN: What are some good resources to learn business administration/finance?

#73

Post by pottertheotter »

Havoc wrote: post #46
pottertheotter wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you say that?

Nobody calls them that in practice so I'd avoid it if trying to sound knowledgable. They're just called notes. Its also quite common for FS to have actual footnotes (ie in bottom margin of page) in addition to notes.

In my experience, I hear and see "notes" and "footnotes" used interchangeably when referring to financial statement notes. I've also not heard anyone react negatively to someone using footnotes instead of notes. Have you run into many people who insist on using only "notes"?

For reference, I've worked in finance for several years (investment banking and as a professional public markets investor [hedge fund]), and I also have a PhD with a focus on capital markets disclosure.

A quick search finds many examples where "footnotes" is used by the SEC [1], the FASB [2, 3, 4], the CFA Institute [5, 6], KPMG [7], and Investopedia [8], to name a few. I also saw several papers in both The Journal of Finance and The Accounting Review that use the term "footnotes".

[1] https://www.sec.gov/reportspubs/investor-publications/invest... [2] https://www.fasb.org/jsp/FASB/Page/SectionPage&cid=117616858... [3] https://www.fasb.org/jsp/FASB/Page/SectionPage&cid=117616372... [4] https://www.fasb.org/resources/ccurl/599/128/ASU%202014-15.p... [5] https://www.cfainstitute.org/en/membership/professional-deve... [6] https://www.cfainstitute.org/-/media/documents/support/progr... [7] https://www.scribd.com/document/335028195/Disclosure-Overloa... [8] https://www.investopedia.com/articles/02/050102.asp

Re: Ask HN: What are some good resources to learn business administration/finance?

#74

Post by marcus_holmes »

john4534243 wrote: post #72
marcus_holmes wrote: post #56

Software engineer with an MBA here. I didn't have a bachelor's degree, got into coding as a hobby and turned it into a career. I needed a degree to put on my CV. All the hard problems I'd encountered weren't in the technology (99.9% of business coding is simple), so learning more CS wasn't actually going to help that much. So I took an MBA (they accepted my board experience as good enough to not require a bachelor's,…

No offence. In my experience Software engineer with an MBA is a person who had found coding is not a skill that suits them.

None taken. Your experience now has a data point that indicates otherwise.

Re: Ask HN: What are some good resources to learn business administration/finance?

#75

Post by marcus_holmes »

jbarnett2 wrote: post #67
marcus_holmes wrote: post #56

Software engineer with an MBA here. I didn't have a bachelor's degree, got into coding as a hobby and turned it into a career. I needed a degree to put on my CV. All the hard problems I'd encountered weren't in the technology (99.9% of business coding is simple), so learning more CS wasn't actually going to help that much. So I took an MBA (they accepted my board experience as good enough to not require a bachelor's,…

Where did you get your MBA?

Curtin Uni in Perth, Australia. It was (briefly) one of the top 100 MBA courses in the world, though apparently they gamed the system to get that, and there was some controversy.

Re: Ask HN: What are some good resources to learn business administration/finance?

#76

Post by andrewlgood »

As a CFO myself, I notice there are a few concepts it is important for successful managers to understand to help discussions regarding performance and investment.

1) Time value of money - internal rate of return (IRR) and net present value (NPV). Both are easily learned on the web in 30 minutes.

2) Broad accounting concepts. Others have recommended learning double entry accounting on this thread. I do not think that necessary - too much in the weeds. You need to understand what is revenue, when it is created (different industries and companies have different rules), what are operating expenses, what is EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, amortization) and why it is a good approximation of cash flow, and why capitalizing some expenses matters. In my experience, the FP&A (financial planning & analysis) team is often the best people to discuss this with as they are responsible for reporting these metrics to management in a manner consistent with how the executive team runs the company.

3) Option theory - more decisions are being discussed as options. Developing a new product idea is an option to ultimately produce and sell the product. The initial investment to blueprint the product, get regulatory approvals, etc can all be thought as the cost of the option. Importantly, you can always walk away from the option if you determine the payoff is too risky (unlikely to be realized) or too low.

While there are more finance concepts to know, they tend to build off the ones above (e.g. reading financial statements builds off the accounting ideas).

A final note, if you are looking for formal online courses on these topics, the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School has a great series of their fundamental courses for MBA students online that were free last time I looked.

Re: Ask HN: What are some good resources to learn business administration/finance?

#77

Post by sukilot »

arthurcolle wrote: post #24
jonahbenton wrote: post #11

The onramp for finance is accounting. There is no other right answer. This is also essential for general business administration. Accounting is a huge topic; being able to read financial statements is a good, first tangible exercise. Best book I have found for this is Thomas Ittelson, Financial Statements. Using double-entry accounting methods for your own financials with a tool like Beancount is super helpful from a…

I have always felt like the thought that comes from engineers (particularly in CS/SWE) that business/finance isn't technical to be a pretty trite attitude. Financial statement analysis is very technical, and things like operations research which many executives have come out of is a highly mathematical subject matter. Just my thoughts.

Business and Finance are not the same thing.

"Business and Finance" is like saying "Apps and Code"

Before computers, many many people like today's computer programmers would be accountants, quants and other financial professionals (and engineers).

Re: Ask HN: What are some good resources to learn business administration/finance?

#78

Post by sukilot »

wtvanhest wrote: post #39
jonahbenton wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely, very few CTOs in my experience understand double entry or know how to read a balance sheet. To their detriment, IMO, but there are all kinds of effective CTOs across all kinds of orgs. But OP was asking for guidance in learning how to engage on those topics- as opposed to communicating about technical things to that audience. Hence the recommendations. I agree about the value of NPV, tho I would argue tha…

People are too quick to recommend accounting and finance books. Or... recommend super complex material because they think the subject is complex. If his/her goal is to learn what it takes to be more effective at the finance piece, they should follow my advice. If they want to go deeper for fun later, they can, but it won’t have as much value as improving the 3 things I mentioned.

Most of this thread is the financial equivalent of someone saying "How do I do mail merge and excel macros to automate some of my business process" and getting answers like "To get started, Install Linux".

Re: Ask HN: What are some good resources to learn business administration/finance?

#79

Post by sukilot »

conductr wrote: post #51
wtvanhest wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I downplayed the value of the P&L, but your right. If the person ultimately wants to get to a CTO role, I imagine the P&L becomes more important overtime. Knowing when to back a project may come down to knowing whether it impacts the right metric. The other thing probably worth studying earlier is HC costing. It’s really easy to understand, but often catches directors/vp in non-finance functions off guard. Basically,…

“can I afford this?” a question I get every day. It's a little naive at times. Because the question is really, what happens if you can't? You should be telling me and any approvers why you need it. Budget is a made up number and we move dollars and rebalance constantly. But the business impacts caused by you not being able to "afford" something, is what real good execs know how to handle. The CTO example is, look I k…

There th Kabuki theater of business management. Precise calculations over phoy assumptions to rationalize political choices.

Re: Ask HN: What are some good resources to learn business administration/finance?

#80

Post by wtvanhest »

sukilot wrote: post #78
wtvanhest wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are too quick to recommend accounting and finance books. Or... recommend super complex material because they think the subject is complex. If his/her goal is to learn what it takes to be more effective at the finance piece, they should follow my advice. If they want to go deeper for fun later, they can, but it won’t have as much value as improving the 3 things I mentioned.

Most of this thread is the financial equivalent of someone saying "How do I do mail merge and excel macros to automate some of my business process" and getting answers like "To get started, Install Linux".

That is a great comparison. I actually got bad advice like this when I started a company 6 or so years ago. I spent way too much time learning stuff that was not important to get results. Now I focus on the basic stuff first, and it works better in all parts of life. That is why I put real advice here, even though, originally it was heavily downvoted
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