The McGraw-Hill Pocket Guide to Business Finance: 201 Decision-Making Tools for Managers [Hardcover]

Joel G. Siegel (Author), Jae K. Shim (Author), Stephen W. Hartman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1992

A reference for making financial decisions in business and for solving business finance problems. It collects 201 of the most commonly-needed financial "tools", describes them and shows how and in what situations to use them. The book is aimed at the non-financial manager.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 354 pages
• Publisher: Mcgraw-Hill (March 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0070575770
• ISBN-13: 978-0070575776
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.2 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,604,733 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful resource for financial and non-financial pros, March 13, 2001

By 

Linda Zarate "IT Ops Consultant" (Azusa, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: McGraw-Hill Pocket Guide to Business Finance: 201 Decision-Making Tools for Managers (Paperback)

The 201 tools contained in this small, highly useful book range from Acid Test (doing a quick ratio of financials) to Z-Scores. Each tool is listed alphabetically, its use explained, and instructions on how to use it is provided. What I particularly liked is the worked examples that accompany each tool.

As an IT consultant who specializes in service delivery this book is not one I would normally include in my professional library. I was introduced to it when a colleague and I were writing a white paper on recovery management. We were searching for a way to link business imperatives to justification for investment in recovery strategies. We found one piece of the puzzle in this book - the Altman Z-Score. This tool predicts whether or not a company is likely to enter into bankruptcy within one or two years. This led to the development of a copyrighted model that addressed survival level objectives, and also became a key part of the Tarrani-Zarate Information Technologies Management Model. All this from a single entry in a small book!

Aside from discovering a relatively obscure, but important, tool I also found other useful tools in this book. Because I am not a business consultant or financial expert the tools were like a cram course in financial management for non-financial people. For example, I was able to apply some of the tools to personal financial matters - the real costs of a loan become quickly apparent when you compute them. I was also able to employ some of the tools to conduct realistic cost/benefit analyses, examine trade-offs supporting approaches to projects, etc. In this respect this small book has significantly improved my professional skills and has inspired me to read other books on financial management.

I strongly recommend this book - collection of tools really - to anyone who deals with finance, anyone who has P&L responsibilities, and business and IT consultants. The latter group will find this book to be invaluable for developing proposals, deliverables and project plans that add value.