In this module, we will start talking about investments. Investments are of course, essential for companies. Companies need investments to be able to survive and to grow. Very important topic of corporate finance, is the financing of these investments. We tend to divide investments into long-term and short-term investments. When we're thinking about long-term investments, we're thinking about investments such as capital expenditures, R&D, and acquisitions. These are investments that might take a long time. They may take awhile to generate cash-flows. We think of these as long term investments. In contrast, we also have short-term investments that generate cash in the short-term that the company has to manage on a short-term basis. Think about inventory or accounts payable. We are going to talk about both long-term, and short-term investments in this course. In this module, we are going to learn how to forecast financing needs, and how to manage a company's liquidity. This is going to be very important. If you have long-term investment needs and you also have short-term investment needs you need a plan. If you have R&D expenditures, and accounts payables, and inventory needs and all these things, you need to know whether you have enough cash or whether you need to raise capital. We need an investment plan. In this module, we will learn how a financial manager can make that plan. We're going to talk about long-term financial planning, which is the funding of long-term investments, such as capital expenditures. Then we're going to talk about short-term financial planning, which as we're going to see, is mostly related to working capital management. We will talk a lot about the implications of working capital management, for cash generation in companies, and how companies can manage their short-term financial planning. Here is what we are not going to talk about in this module. What is coming up in later modules. We will not discuss whether an investment should be made or not. In this module, we will take investments as given, and talk about the financing, the funding of these investments. In the next two modules, we will talk about whether companies should invest or not. We will see the tools needed to make decisions about new investments. In Module 3, we're going to talk about that. We're going to talk about the tools that allow us to measure whether a new investment increases shareholder value or not. Then in Module 4, we will take a look at acquisitions, and whether they increase shareholder value or not. What we will learn in this module, is for financial planning required to make short-term and long-term investments. The very first thing that we will talk about, is the forecasting of financial statements. We need to forecast financial statements to estimate the long term financing needs that companies have. Next, we're going to talk about working capital management that relate to short-term investments like receivables, inventories, and so on. We will learn that working capital management has very important implications for cash generation in companies in the short term. We will learn how to calculate, and analyze working capital ratios, how to measure cash conversion cycles, and what they mean. We will look at several examples that illustrate the importance of working capital management for short-term cash generation in companies. Among others, we will look at one example of inventory management, when sales growth rates are very high. Then we will look at another example, where seasonality in sales creates short-term cash needs. Finally, we will talk about liquidity risk, and how liquidity risk relates to short-term financial needs. Those are the topics we will be talking about in our financial planning module.