Analysis of Financial and Non-Financial Information for Forecasting Performance

This note describes the main themes and cases of a teaching module on the analysis of information from, and outside of, financial statements for forecasting firms’ future financial performance. The module’s pedagogical goal is to deepen students’ understanding of the necessary analysis tools to apply, questions to ask, and information to seek out when evaluating how firm performance is likely to evolve over time. This module is taught as part of the course “Business Analysis and Valuation using Financial Statements” (BAV), a second-year MBA elective at Harvard Business School. Instructors can teach this module as a part of MBA or executive education courses on topics such as financial statement analysis, accounting, forecasting, or valuation. The target audience of this module are those students who have been exposed to the equivalent of first-year MBA courses in accounting and finance.