Presenting Financial Figures

Numbers are essential tools used in the decision-making process in a company. Effective management entails the proper use of financial figures. But a lot of people have a fear of numbers stemming from unpleasant experiences with them during their school years. In order to understand and use numbers fear must be overcome first. Understanding will then follow; you will know what numbers can tell and what they can not tell. You will know when it is appropriate to use them and when it is not. You will come to know their limitations. Only at this time will figures become a useful tool for making decisions and enhancing the quality of decisions.

Decision-making in a company usually involves presenting financial figures to several managers, not all of whom have backgrounds in FINANCE. The objectives of presenting financial figures to them are to educate and inform them of the financial performance of the company and convince them of future trends that must be considered in order to give direction to the company. This means that the presentation must be clear and comprehensible to the audience. It is not enough to print out financial statements, hand them out and discuss them line by line. This will not accomplish understanding and clarity. Doing away almost completely with figures and financial terms and steering away from technical discussions is tempting because it may seem easier and simpler, but neither will it achieve the goals of educating, informing and convincing the audience.

A better approach to presenting financial figures is to try to level the financial understanding of the attendees. He should put himself in their shoes and think of ways to incorporate financial terms and figures in his presentation in an easily understandable manner, explaining along the way the terms that can not be replaced with layman's terms.

To prepare for the challenge of presenting financial figures, the presenter must first select the most critical numbers, making sure that all assumptions or basis for each are explained. Decide also which financial terms and concepts are needed for the presentation and how these terms can be explained in layman's terms.

It is a good idea to develop an outline of your presentation showing the objectives, critical financial concepts or principles and critical figures. This will serve as a guide for the flow of your presentation.

The presentation should start with an explanation of the objectives. Tell the audience what you wish to accomplish and give them a summary of the discussion points. Establish clearly the importance of understanding the critical concepts that you are including in your presentation. Tell the audience why they need to understand the concepts. To explain the concepts, you can relate them to some familiar and ordinary situations. Analogies can be used as a tool to accomplish this. To maintain your audience's attention throughout the presentation, keep referring back to your familiar and ordinary situations that you used as examples so that your audience can keep up with the story that you are trying to tell. Take short breaks to let the audience absorb the ideas and figures and encourage them to ask questions.

Government Grants for Dummies!

Getting FINANCE from a government grant can solve funding problems and the money doesn’t have to be repaid. Nevertheless, qualifying for a government grant is not an easy task and there are different requisites for each kind of grant. Though explaining each grant in detail exceeds the purpose of this article, we will give a general idea of what to expect when applying for government grants.

Types of Grants

There are grants available for first time home buyers, for college students, for non profit organizations, for starting businesses, for small running businesses, and so on. Each type of grant is handled by a different government agency and of course, they have different requirements.

What all these different grants have in common is the fact that their purpose is to provide FINANCE for those in an underprivileged situation in each particular field. That being said, it is important to make clear that the rule by which government grants are awarded is in most of the cases based on the needs of the applicants.

Requirements

Due to the nature of government grants there is no such thing as a fixed set of requirements that the different grant types have in common. Generally speaking the underprivileged factor is an important variable; however, there are certain types of government grants that can be easily awarded to people in a good financial position. Government grants intended for production or services are the best examples of this.

There are also grants that are awarded if the applicant is resident in certain state or certain territory. The geographic variable can turn out to be very important as the federal government provides founds in order to reduce the differences. Being part of specific minorities can also be a requirement for approval. This is called positive discrimination or affirmative action and as the previous requisite it serves the purpose of reducing differences.

Though the above are all common requisites, they are not present on all government grant’s types and, as stated before, each grant has different requirements. Thus, there is no other choice than to obtain the specific forms and learn which are the requirements you need to meet in order to apply for a government grant.

Where to find them

There are many government agencies providing founding. Each agency has a web site where you’ll be able to find the information or at least a contact number to inquire about it. If you already know which type of grant you might be entitled to obtain, you can try to contact the government agency directly and get all the application forms and documentation needed.

However, if you are unsure or you would like to know which grants are available and what requisites you need for each specific grant, there are many online sites that can offer you all the information already packed from many government agencies in the same web portal so you won’t have to spend many ours doing research.

 

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