Business is a cut-throat environment. Even with an excellent idea or brilliant marketing plan, there is no guarantee of success. Besides having innovative ideas and the willpower to succeed, you need sound management and business skills, and you need to know how to apply the best business practices, whether you are an entrepreneur or a professional manager.

A business is fundamentally a cash-oriented process. This means that its ideas, image or products, no matter how remarkable, are still not as important as the ability to earn an income to stay afloat and have a reliable and accessible cash flow. A manager must be able to keep track of all income, expenses, assets the business owns and the cash flow. Poor fiscal management and inadequate accounting practices produce weak or incorrect information, preventing management from making well-informed decisions or adapting adequately to changes in the environment.

Basic Financial Management is written to answer the question: What does ANY manager or entrepreneur need to know to guarantee sound financial management?

Chapter 1: An introduction to financial management for marketing managers
Chapter 2: Basic accounting and financial statements
Chapter 3: Analysing the annual financial statements
Chapter 4: The capital requirements of any enterprise or organisation
Chapter 5: Financing the capital requirements of an enterprise
Chapter 6: The financial break-even analysis
Chapter 7: Budgets
Chapter 8: Managing credit
Chapter 9: Managing stock/inventory
Chapter 10: It is all about the data

This book gives students of Commerce and Financial Management the tools to grasp basic business functionality, ranging from everyday record-keeping to annual financial analysis. It will also be appreciated by anyone involved in the management of a business enterprise, from managers of SMMEs to CEOs of large corporations.