Free The 30 Day MBA by Colin Barrow Page A

detailed financials with its peer group based on its activity codes, and the software lets you search for companies that comply with your own criteria, combining as many conditions as you like. FAME is available in business libraries and on CD from the publishers, who also offer a free trial ( www.bvdinfo.com/Products/Company-Information/National/Fame ).
Key Note ( www.keynote.co.uk ) operates in 18 countries, providing business ratios and trends for 140 industry sectors and sufficient information to assess accurately the financial health of each industry sector. Using this service you can find out how profitable a business sector is and how successful the main companies operating in each sector are. Executive summaries are free, but expect to pay between £250/$392/€282 and £500/$784/€564 for most reports.
London Stock Exchange’s website ( www.londonstockexchange.com ).
Proshare ( www.proshareclubs.co.uk > Research Centre > Performance Tables) is an Investment Club website, which, once you have registered, which you can do for free, has a number of tools that crunch public company ratios for you. Select the companies you want to look at, then the ratios you are most interested in: EPS, P/E, ROI, Dividend Yield and so forth. Press the button and in a couple of seconds all is revealed. You can then rank the companies by performance in more or less any way you want.
Precision IR ( www.precisionir.com ) has direct links to several thousand public companies’ ‘Report and Accounts’ online, so you can save yourself the time and trouble of hunting down company websites.
    Ratio analysis spreadsheets
    biz/ed ( www.bized.co.uk > Business focus > Ratio Analysis Theory and Practice) and the Harvard Business School ( www.alumni.hbs.edu/new_alumni/toolkit/tools/ratioanalysis.xls ) have free tools that calculate financial ratios from your financial data. They also provide useful introductions to ratio analysis as well as defining each ratio and the formula used to calculate it. At least by entering this you don’t need to register on the Harvard website to be able to download their spreadsheet.
    Break-even analysis
    A tool for making cost, volume, pricing and profit decisions
    Break-even is a technique that straddles several business disciplines. Marketeers use it for pricing, economists borrow it for demand curves and accountants use it for costing purposes. Break-even analysis had started to appear by 1962 ( Break-Even Analysis: Its Uses and Misuses , by Howard F Stettler, 1962, American Accounting Association). But most managers still have barely heard of this tool and those who have don’t know how to use it. This gives the MBA a powerful edge and allows them to muscle into decisions that are normally the prerogative of those several pay grades higher and in different departments to boot!
    Working out the cost of making a product or delivering a service and consequently how much to charge doesn’t seem too complicated. At first glance the problem is simple. You just add up all the costs and charge a bit more. The more you charge above your costs, provided the customers will keep on buying, the more profit you make. Unfortunately as soon as you start to do the sums the problem gets a little more complex. For a start, not all costs have the same characteristics. Some costs, for example, do not change however much you sell. If you are running a shop, the rent and rates are relatively constant figures, completely independent of the volume of your sales. On the other hand, the cost of the products sold from the shop is completely dependent on volume. The more you sell, the more it costs you to buy in stock.

    You can’t really add up those two types of costs until you have made an assumption about volume – how much you plan to sell. Look at the simple example above. Until we decide to buy, and we hope sell, 1,000 units of our product, we cannot total the costs. With the volume