"The trend is your friend"is a practical principle often used by
business managers, who seek to forecast future sales, expenditures, and
profitability in order to make production and other operational
decisions. The problem is how best to identify and discover business
trends and utilize trend information for attaining objectives of
firms.This book contains an Excel-based solution to this problem,
applying principles of the authors' "profit system model" of the firm
that enables forecasts of trends in sales, expenditures, profits and
other business variables. The program, called FIRM, which runs on
Windows with Microsoft Excel 2010, useshistorical time series of total
sales, total costs, and total assets of the firm from its financial
statements (income statements and balance sheets), estimates
relationships among these variables, and then employs the estimated
relationships to forecasts trends in these vital business variables.
Featuring step-by-step case examples, the goal is to equip business
managers and students with easy-to-use tools for understanding and
forecasting trends in important business variables, thereby empowering
them to make better business decisions.