FPAC cheat sheet

Profit margin = net income / revenue; operating margin = operating income (EBIT) / revenue; gross margin = gross profit / revenue. Each strips out successively more non-operating items.

Return on equity = net income / average shareholders' equity; DuPont: ROE = net margin × asset turnover × equity multiplier, isolating profitability, efficiency, and leverage.

Current ratio = current assets / current liabilities (liquidity); quick ratio excludes inventory and prepaids; cash ratio keeps only cash and marketable securities.

Free cash flow to firm = operating cash flow − capital expenditures; FCFE further subtracts net debt repayments. Positive FCF signals self-funding capacity.

Working capital cycle = days inventory outstanding + days sales outstanding − days payables outstanding; a rising cycle consumes cash even when profit grows.

NPV = Σ CFt / (1+r)^t − initial outlay; accept if NPV > 0. IRR is the discount rate where NPV = 0; IRR can mislead with non-conventional or mutually exclusive cash flows, so prefer NPV.

Horizontal (trend) analysis compares line items across periods as a percentage of a base year; vertical (common-size) analysis expresses each item as a percentage of revenue or total assets.

A liquidity ratio above 1.0 is not automatically healthy: very high current ratios can indicate idle cash or slow-moving inventory rather than strength.

Data warehouse stores structured, schema-on-write data for reporting (OLAP); a data lake stores raw structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data with schema-on-read; a lakehouse adds warehouse-style governance and ACID transactions on lake storage.

ETL transforms data before loading; ELT loads raw data first and transforms inside the target (common with cloud warehouses). ELT preserves raw lineage and scales better with large volumes.

Star schema: one fact table (measures, foreign keys) surrounded by denormalized dimension tables. Snowflake schema normalizes dimensions into hierarchies; star is faster for queries, snowflake reduces redundancy.

Primary key uniquely identifies a row and cannot be null; foreign key references a primary key in another table and enforces referential integrity; a unique constraint permits one null in most engines.

SQL execution order is logically FROM → WHERE → GROUP BY → HAVING → SELECT → ORDER BY → LIMIT; WHERE filters rows before aggregation, HAVING filters aggregated groups.

INNER JOIN returns only matching rows; LEFT JOIN keeps all left rows with nulls for unmatched right columns; FULL OUTER JOIN keeps unmatched rows from both sides.

Data quality dimensions include accuracy, completeness, consistency, timeliness, uniqueness, and validity; a data governance program assigns ownership and defines these rules per dataset.

Encryption at rest protects stored data; encryption in transit (TLS) protects data on the wire; tokenization replaces sensitive values with non-reversible tokens to reduce PCI/regulatory scope.

A KPI dashboard should tie each metric to a defined calculation, source system, refresh cadence, and owner; without a metric definition, the same term (e.g., 'active user') yields conflicting numbers across teams.