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Do you remember how to calculate free cash flow? How about cost of carry? Well, if you don’t, there’s help out there. The latest trend on finance LinkedIn is for experts to produce splashy “cheat sheets” that can keep that information and more, right where you need it.
While they can be useful, all of these cheat sheets should come with a “buyer beware” warning. You should probably always look for additional sources whenever you’re doing important work, recognizing that these cheat sheets could be wrong for your situation, for a variety of reasons: A mix of typos might have crept in at any point in creating these cheats sheets, and there are differing approaches to some of the calculations they discuss (such as how to compute customer lifetime value at a high-growth startup) that can’t be quickly summarized.
To help you sort through the avalanche of information out there, here are three that caught our eye, and what they have to share.
- Nicolas Boucher’s Finance Cheat Sheet: One of the more comprehensive offerings out there, this offers the formulas for 90 different key performance indicators. It also devotes substantial real estate to describing the financial organization, from job titles and hierarchy to methods and skills required for different positions. One of the more surprising pieces is a section on “Financial terms explained to non-finance people”. Try them out on your friends and family, and let us know if they work.
- Oana Labes’s Accounting vs. Finance Cheat Sheet: Shared with the comment, “Because Accounting is Not Finance,” this sheet sends both fields to their respective sides, and compares them. There are examples of different KPIs, required skills, career paths, and then certain information that’s more important for accounting or finance. It’s hard to choose just one cheat sheet from Labes to share, because her LinkedIn feed is full of infographics on everything from cash flow to profitability. She seems to be assembling almost a textbook full of information on her feed.
- Josh Aharonoff’s SaaS Cheat Sheet: Aharonoff also has plenty of broader finance material on his LinkedIn feed, but this industry-specific look digs into a few areas of concern for professionals in the software-as-a-service space. Those breakdowns seem like the kind of thing a SaaS specialist can use as a reminder of what differentiates the work they’re doing from others, when on a quick call with investors or other stakeholders.
What are you looking for as quick-reference material, and what resources have you found most helpful in your finance journey? Drop us a line and let us know.—SW