Building Out a Basic Income Statement

To begin a technical tutorial series, it's important to select a topic that would be interesting to viewers, but equally as important to select a topic that shows that you are competent, so viewers will return and want to explore more. I think building out a basic income statement in Excel is the perfect way to start off a technical series. Christine Wolf mentions in her article: "DIY videos on YouTube" that people just feel more confident when they see another person explaining something they don't know how to do. In this case, finance students may have no clue how to build out an income statement but can learn from someone who's only a year or two older than them. I expect this video to be found by users searching for basic information about finance, via the YouTube algorithm, and I think the basic video format will entice them for long enough to watch the full length of the video. My intended audience for a video like this is employers as well as prospective finance students who haven't learned anything about finance just yet in school.

 

Delving a little deeper into the student audience a little more, I know how I felt during my freshman year at Rutgers. Forced to take classes like environmental science and expository writing when all I wanted to learn about was finance. The lack of resources led me to feel unmotivated and I didn't know where to go for information. It wasn't until I went through the Road to Wall Street program's application process where I finally confirmed that finance was where I wanted to be. You have to learn some technical questions in preparation for the interviews so that was my first exposure to what an income statement was, for example. Watching back through this tutorial video I've created, I'm blown away by how far I've come on this journey, and I'm nowhere close to the end yet. I learned how to build out an income statement in the class associated with the Road to Wall Street program, so I definitely have to credit my professor Ken Freeman with my knowledge on this topic as well as the numbers that I used on my excel sheet.

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To the audience comprised of employers, thank you for taking the time to view my page, this quick tutorial just scratches the surface of what I'm capable of at this time, and I know that in one month, 6 months, 1 year, I'll be so much further along in this journey and will have so much more knowledge than I do today. Thank you again for watching my video or viewing my site, and I hope to speak with you soon.

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Here is the Excel File I used in it's original state:

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Here is the Excel File I used in it's completed state:

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