The trend is your friendis a practical principle often used by business managers, who seek to forecast future sales, expenditures, and profitability in order to make production and other operational decisions. The problem is how best to identify and discover business trends and utilize trend information for attaining objectives of firms.This book contains an Excel-based solution to this problem, applying principles of the authors' profit system model of the firm that enables forecasts of trends in sales, expenditures, profits and other business variables. The program, called FIRM, which runs on Windows with Microsoft Excel 2010, useshistorical time series of total sales, total costs, and total assets of the firm from its financial statements (income statements and balance sheets), estimates relationships among these variables, and then employs the estimated relationships to forecasts trends in these vital business variables. Featuring step-by-step case examples, the goalis to equip business managers and students with easy-to-use tools for understanding and forecasting trends in important business variables, thereby empowering them to make better business decisions.

Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras

Autorentext
Professor James W. Kolari obtained his PhD in Finance at Arizona State University in 1980 and thereafter has taught financial markets and institutions at Texas A&M University in the Finance Department. In 1994 he was awarded the JP Morgan Chase Professorship in Finance in the Mays Business School. Dr. Kolari has more than 30 years research experience in the areas of computer-based modeling of financial markets (including stock, bond, and real estate markets), financial institutions (such as banks and insurance companies), and financial regulation. Over the years, he has been a Visiting Scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, Fulbright Scholar at the University of Helsinki and Bank of Finland, Faculty Fellow with the Mortgage Bankers Association of America, and Senior Research Fellow at the Swedish School of Business and Economics (Hanken) in Finland, in addition to being a consultant to the U.S. Small Business Administration, U.S. Information Agency, American Bankers Association, Independent Bankers Association of America, and numerous banks and other organizations. He has published over 100 articles published in refereed journals, numerous other papers and monographs, and 12 co-authored books. His papers have appeared in such domestic and international journals as the Journal of Finance, Journal of Business, Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Journal of Banking and Finance, Real Estate Economics, Journal of International Money and Finance, and Scandanavian Journal of Economics. Papers in Dutch, Finnish, Italian, Swedish, and Russian have appeared outside of the United States. He is a co-author of leading college textbooks in commercial banking and international business courses. Dr. Ali Anari obtained his PhD in Industrial Economics and Business Studies at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom in 1978. He has more than 30 years research experience in developing computer-based economic models for economic analysis and forecasting in the areas of energy economics, macroeconomics, real estate economics, and regional economics. In his professional career Dr. Anari has been a research economist in the areas of national and regional economic modeling at the Center for Business and Economic Analysis in the Mays Business School at Texas A&M University, Visiting Scholar in the Anderson School of Management of the University of California, Los Angeles, research economist at the Imperial College of Science and Technology, London, research fellow at the University of Birmingham, U.K., and economic analyst at the economics and statistics department of National Iranian Oil Company. He has presented papers on economic modeling at conferences around the world and published book chapters and articles in such scholarly publications as the Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking, Journal of Applied Economics, Journal of Financial Research, Journal of Real Estate Economics, Journal of Economics and Business, Journal of Energy Policy, and Journal of Emerging Markets. Current research interests include developing economic models for early warning of real estate bubbles, profitability and economic growth, and regional profitability analysis.

Klappentext

The trend is your friend is a practical principle often used by business managers, who seek to forecast future sales, expenditures, and profitability in order to make production and other operational decisions. The problem is how best to identify and discover business trends and utilize trend information for attaining objectives of firms.This book contains an Excel-based solution to this problem, applying principles of the authors profit system model of the firm that enables forecasts of trends in sales, expenditures, profits and other business variables. The program, called FIRM, which runs on Windows with Microsoft Excel 2010, useshistorical time series of total sales, total costs, and total assets of the firm from its financial statements (income statements and balance sheets), estimates relationships among these variables, and then employs the estimated relationships to forecasts trends in these vital business variables. Featuring step-by-step case examples, the goalis to equip business managers and students with easy-to-use tools for understanding and forecasting trends in important business variables, thereby empowering them to make better business decisions.