Knowledge Base: BIWS Financial Modeling Tutorials

Learn about the financial statements (the Income Statement, Balance Sheet, and Cash Flow Statement), more advanced topics like leases and deferred taxes, and common finance interview questions on all these concepts.

Understand how to build full 3-statement models in Excel, which might be used in everything from corporate finance roles for budgeting purposes to investment banking interviews for case studies and modeling tests.

Learn about the advantages and disadvantages of Debt and Equity and why companies choose one or the other when making their financing decisions. The tutorials also cover bond yields and their many variations.

You’ll learn why the DCF is central to all valuation in these tutorials, including lessons on Unlevered FCF, Terminal Value, WACC, and the Mid-Year Convention.

Equity Value and Enterprise Value are critical ingredients in all valuations, and you’ll get the full recipe book in these tutorials, from the Enterprise Value bridge to interview questions and the treatment of specific line items, such as pensions.

Learn Excel from the ground up, including formatting and graphing tricks, sensitivity tables, Power Query, Lambda functions, XLOOKUP, INDEX/MATCH, and basic VBA.

Learn all about core concepts such as the time value of money, present value, net present value, the internal rate of return, and the Discount Rate in these tutorials. You’ll also get tips on financial modeling best practices and the fastest ways to learn it.

These tutorials explain how to interpret the financial statements, from key metrics such as ROE, ROA, and ROIC to FCF, Operating Leverage, and more. If you understand these topics, you can quickly spot red flags and green flags when assessing a company’s financial health.

Interviewers in investment banking could ask you about almost anything, but these tutorials focus on behavioral questions, such as how to walk through your resume and prepare stories for the most common “fit” questions. For technical questions, see everything else on this page.

These tutorials give you a crash course on LBO models, which are commonly tested in investment banking and private equity interviews. You’ll learn everything from the basic concepts to Paper LBOs, PIK Interest, Convertible Preferred Stock, and tricks for calculating IRR quickly.

If you want to work in M&A, you’ll have to understand how mergers and acquisitions are financed, how to estimate EPS accretion/dilution, and how to answer common interview questions about deals. The “icing on the cake” here is the coverage of more advanced topics, such as Earnouts, Negative Goodwill, and Section 382 NOLs.

Many people underestimate the importance of PowerPoint in finance; they tend to lose their jobs quickly. To use it well, check out the tutorials here on the shortcuts, shapes, maps, tables, macros, Slide Master, and a whole lot more.

If you work in investment banking, you’ll consume a lot of Red Bull and conduct a lot of valuations (often at the same time). These tutorials explain how comparable public companies and precedent transactions work, including the concepts, executed examples, and ingredients like the Cost of Equity and Cost of Debt.

Learn how banks work differently from normal companies, including loan loss accounting, regulatory capital, the dividend discount model, and valuation multiples such as P / BV and P / TBV.

Biotech valuation makes “pre-revenue” cool again: Companies with no revenue-generating products can legitimately be worth billions! Just watch these tutorials to understand how the magical unicorn factory works.

These tutorials explain what to expect in private equity funds of funds and secondaries case studies, including key operational metrics, the financial statements, and the waterfall structure used to award Carried Interest.

Insurance modeling, just like bank modeling, is very “different,” so these tutorials explain key concepts, like written vs. earned premiums, claims, reserves, and the shape of the financial statements.

You’ll learn how the entire Oil & Gas sector works in these tutorials, from Upstream and Midstream differences to very specific topics, such as Type Curves and how to estimate the Decline Rate for a company’s existing production.

A solar plant, a wind farm, and an airport walk into a bar… and suddenly realize they have a lot in common, such as Debt sizing and sculpting, Cash Flow Available for Debt Service, and an alphabet soup of terminology (DSCR, LLCR, etc.).

Real estate investment trusts have a small army of specialized valuation methodologies, metrics, and multiples, from the Net Asset Value (NAV) Model to Funds From Operations (FFO), EPRA Earnings, and more. Learn how to command this army and build your own version here.

These tutorials walk you through the Pro-Forma for individual properties, waterfall models, and key metrics/calculations, such as the Cap Rate, Loan-to-Value (LTV) Ratio, and even Leasing Commissions for new developments and acquisitions.

Venture capitalists are notoriously… “non-technical,” to be diplomatic. But if you read or watch these tutorials, you’ll be considerably better-informed since you’ll know all about SaaS accounting, convertible notes, SAFEs, liquidation preferences, and cap tables – key topics when evaluating and investing in startups.