Financial Forecasting in Python

In this chapter, we will learn the basics of financial statements, with a specific focus on the income statement, which provides details on our sales, costs, and profits. We will learn how to calculate profitability metrics and finish off what we have learned by building our profit forecast for Tesla!

In this chapter, we will learn a bit more about the balance sheet, covering assets and liabilities and specific ratios to help evaluate the financial health and efficiency of a company, as well as how these ratios can assist us in building a great forecast.

We have gotten a basic understanding of income statements and balance sheets. However, consolidating data for forecasting is complex, so in this chapter, we will look at some basic tools to help solve some of the complexities specifically relating to finance - working with dates and different financial periods, and formatting our raw data into the correct format for financial forecasting.

In this chapter, we will be exploring two more aspects to creating a good forecast. First, we will look at assumptions, what drives them and what happens when an assumption changes? Next, we will look at variances, as a forecast is built at one point in time, but what happens when the actual results do not correspond to our forecast? We need to build a sensitive forecast that can be sensitive to changes in both assumptions and take into account variances, and this is what we will explore in this chapter.