BA 300 - Principles of Finance

Business Finance Essentials is a text designed to provide students with an opportunity to learn the fundamentals of business finance without the additional cost of a textbook. This book has been developed with over a decade of classroom use in both face-to-face and online classes at Pittsburg State University.

This book is designed to help you internalize the basics of money and banking. There is a little math, some graphs, and some sophisticated vocabulary, but nothing terribly difficult, if you put your brain to it. The text’s most important goal is to get you to think for yourselves.

This Open Textbook is a dynamic guide incorporating the essential skills needed to build a foundation in Financial Analysis. Students and readers will learn how to insightfully read a Financial Statement, utilize key financial ratios in order to derive forward-looking investment-related inferences from the accounting data, engage in elementary forecasting and modeling, master the theory of the Time Value of Money, and learn to price stocks and bonds in an environment in which interest rates constantly change

Personal Finance includes personal finance planning problems with links to solutions, and personal application exercises, with links to their associated worksheet(s) or spreadsheet(s). In addition, the text boasts a large number of links to videos, podcasts, experts' tips or blogs, and magazine articles to illustrate the practical applications for concepts covered in the text.

Designed to meet the scope and sequence of your course, Principles of Finance provides a strong foundation in financial applications using an innovative use-case approach to explore their role in business decision-making.

The text provides a nice overview of the risk measurement and the nature of risk in various situations (e.g., legal liability, workers compensation, auto and property ownership, etc.). It focuses heavily on "risk financing" (usually via insurance), while at times neglecting "risk reduction."