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business finance

Written byJ. Fred Weston,
J. Fred Weston
Emeritus Professor of Managerial Economics and Finance, University of California, Los Angeles. Author of The Scope and Methodology of Finance and others.
S. Nicholas Woodward
S. Nicholas Woodward
Fellow, Templeton College—the Oxford Centre for Management Studies, University of Oxford. Coauthor of Finance for Managers.
Fact-checked byThe Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Encyclopaedia Britannica's editors oversee subject areas in which they have extensive knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by working on that content or via study for an advanced degree. They write new content and verify and edit content received from contributors.
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business finance, the raising and managing of funds by business organizations. Planning, analysis, and control operations are responsibilities of the financial manager, who is usually close to the top of the organizational structure of a firm. In very large firms, major financial decisions are often made by a finance committee. In small firms, the owner-manager usually conducts the financial operations. Much of the day-to-day work of business finance is conducted by lower-level staff; their work includes handling cash receipts and disbursements, borrowing from commercial banks on a regular and continuing basis, and formulating cash budgets.

Financial decisions affect both the profitability and the risk of a firm’s operations. An increase in cash holdings, for instance, reduces risk; but, because cash is not an earning asset, converting other types of assets to cash reduces the firm’s profitability. Similarly, the use of additional debt can raise the profitability of a firm (because it is expanding its business with borrowed money), but more debt means more risk. Striking a balance—between risk and profitability—that will maintain the long-term value of a firm’s securities is the task of finance.

Learn about good debt and bad debt.
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Short-term financial operations

Financial planning and control

Short-term financial operations are closely involved with the financial planning and control activities of a firm. These include financial ratio analysis, profit planning, financial forecasting, and budgeting.

Financial ratio analysis

A firm’s balance sheet contains many items that, taken by themselves, have no clear meaning. Financial ratio analysis is a way of appraising their relative importance. The ratio of current assets to current liabilities, for example, gives the analyst an idea of the extent to which the firm can meet its current obligations. This is known as a liquidity ratio. Financial leverage ratios (such as the debt–asset ratio and debt as a percentage of total capitalization) are used to make judgments about the advantages to be gained from raising funds by the issuance of bonds (debt) rather than stock. Activity ratios, relating to the turnover of such asset categories as inventories, accounts receivable, and fixed assets, show how intensively a firm is employing its assets. A firm’s primary operating objective is to earn a good return on its invested capital, and various profit ratios (profits as a percentage of sales, of assets, or of net worth) show how successfully it is meeting this objective.

Ratio analysis is used to compare a firm’s performance with that of other firms in the same industry or with the performance of industry in general. It is also used to study trends in the firm’s performance over time and thus to anticipate problems before they develop.

Profit planning

Ratio analysis applies to a firm’s current operating posture. But a firm must also plan for future growth. This requires decisions as to the expansion of existing operations and, in manufacturing, to the development of new product lines. A firm must choose between productive processes requiring various degrees of mechanization or automation—that is, various amounts of fixed capital in the form of machinery and equipment. This will increase fixed costs (costs that are relatively constant and do not decrease when the firm is operating at levels below full capacity). The higher the proportion of fixed costs to total costs, the higher must be the level of operation before profits begin, and the more sensitive profits will be to changes in the level of operation.

Financial forecasting

The financial manager must also make overall forecasts of future capital requirements to ensure that funds will be available to finance new investment programs. The first step in making such a forecast is to obtain an estimate of sales during each year of the planning period. This estimate is worked out jointly by the marketing, production, and finance departments: the marketing manager estimates demand; the production manager estimates capacity; and the financial manager estimates availability of funds to finance new accounts receivable, inventories, and fixed assets.

For the predicted level of sales, the financial manager estimates the funds that will be available from the company’s operations and compares this amount with what will be needed to pay for the new fixed assets (machinery, equipment, etc.). If the growth rate exceeds 10 percent a year, asset requirements are likely to exceed internal sources of funds, so plans must be made to finance them by issuing securities. If, on the other hand, growth is slow, more funds will be generated than are required to support the estimated growth in sales. In this case, the financial manager will consider a number of alternatives, including increasing dividends to stockholders, retiring debt, using excess funds to acquire other firms, or, perhaps, increasing expenditures on research and development.