Managerial Finance
Managerial finance concerns itself with the managerial significance of finance. It is focused on assessment rather than technique. For instance, in reviewing an annual report, one concerned with technique would be primarily interested in measurement. They would ask: is money being assigned to the right categories? Were generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) followed?
A person working in managerial finance would be interested in the significance of a firm's financial figures measured against multiple targets such as internal goals and competitor figures.They may look at changes in asset balances and probe for red flags that indicate problems with bill collection or bad debt as well as analyze working capital to anticipate future cash flow problems.
Sound financial management creates value and organizational ability through the allocation of scarce resources amongst competing business opportunities. It is an aid to the implementation and monitoring of business strategies and helps achieve business objectives.
Corporate Finance
Corporate finance is the area of finance dealing with monetary decisions that business enterprises make and the tools and analysis used to make those decisions. The primary goal of corporate finance is to maximize shareholder value. Although it is in principle different from managerial finance, which studies the financial decisions of all firms, rather than corporations alone, the main concepts in the study of corporate finance are applicable to financial problems of all kinds of firms.
The discipline can be divided into long-term and short-term decisions and techniques. Capital investment decisions are long-term choices about which projects receive investment, whether to finance that investment with equity or debt, and when or whether to pay dividends to shareholders. On the other hand, short-term decisions deal with the short-term balance of current assets and current liabilities; the focus here is on managing cash, inventories, short-term borrowing, and lending (such as the terms on credit extended to customers).
The terms corporate finance and corporate financier are also associated with investment banking. The typical role of an investment bank is to evaluate the company's financial needs and raise the appropriate type of capital that best fits those needs. Thus, the terms "corporate finance" and "corporate financier" may be associated with transactions in which capital is raised in order to create, develop, grow, or acquire businesses.
