Financial Statements - How to Prepare and Analyze

Are you studying, or planning to study, business? Or are you running, or planning to open, a business of your own? Then you definitely need to know how to prepare financial statements and how to interpret the numbers in those statements for decision-making. The specific objective of this module is to learn:

how to record economic transactions (You will never forget this in your life!)
how to prepare an Income Statement, Balance Sheet, and Cash Flow Statement
how to analyze financial statements from the point of view of managers, investors, and bankers
This course is suitable for those:

Who are currently studying, or planning to study, business studies
Who are already managing, or planning to open, a business
Who studied accounting in the past but still struggle with key concepts
In this course, we will perform comparative analysis between firms using liquidity, efficiency, profitability, and leverage ratios. We will also learn how to use the DuPont Analytical techniques to analyze firms’ financial statements. Apart from short lectures, we will follow problem based learning (PBL) to make sessions interesting and enjoyable. We will emphasize ‘learning by doing’ and working in groups.

Course leader

S. van der Laan

Target group

None. This course will take place in the morning so this could potentially be combined with FIN201 Finance – Fundamental Tools and Techniques which will take place in the afternoon.

Course aim

In this course, you will:

learn basic accounting principles and book-keeping techniques to record financial transactions
learn how to prepare financial statements
learn how to analyze financial statements to look at the numbers from owners’ (to know the value of the investment), managers’ (to verify companies’ strengths and weaknesses), or creditors’ (to know if lending money is safe or not) points of view.

Credits info

2 EC
Maastricht Summer School awards academic credit (ECTS) for courses successfully completed during the programme. To include these credits in the curriculum of your degree, you need to obtain official approval from the responsible department at your home institution.

Upon completion of a course, the Maastricht Summer School issues a transcript. The transcript states the student’s name, student ID-number, the grade or Pass/Fail and the number of ECTS credits.

Fee info

EUR 400: This 1-week course costs €400,-.