Financial Modeling Curriculum: How to Build a Financial Model.

Motivation

When I started my career as an intern, I was very bad. Comically bad. And I wanted very badly to be good.

So I did three things which really helped: a) I got better by watching another analyst build; b) by buying Breaking Into Wall Street (BIWS)¹ when that was expensive for me; and c) by recreating Macabacus² workbooks from scratch. I would keep the original visible, open a blank workbook, disable copy/paste, and rebuild the same model cell by cell. Doing that repeatedly forces you to internalize structure instead of memorizing steps. Over time, your speed improves, your error rate drops, and your judgment about what "good" looks like gets sharper.

My efforts largely worked. I still have things to learn, but I became much faster, made fewer errors, and ranked in the top for the Microsoft Excel global modelling championships in 2018. I am proud of that, but the more useful point is simpler: financial modeling is learnable if the standard is visible and the practice is deliberate.

This curriculum is what I wish I had then: high-quality materials, at no cost, with instruction around them, grounded in experienced, industry-specific expertise.

This curriculum starts with no assumed knowledge: how to use Excel, how to format a workbook, and how to build basic modeling habits. It then builds incrementally, module by module, through the linked three-statement module. From there, it goes into additional functionality and ends with practical, fully complete outputs you can download as templates for your own work or personal improvement.

The running company example is Lumen Tutoring Co., a fictional K-12 tutoring business that operates learning centers as well as offers online sessions.

How To Use This Map

You can take the entire curriculum in order because it builds on itself, jump straight to a subject of interest, or go to the end to download the finished product and templates.

1. BIWS. Breaking Into Wall Street is Brian DeChesare's financial modeling training platform. It is very good: the material is broken into short video modules, and the workbook pedagogy is excellent because you follow along from a blank pre-workbook to a completed post-workbook rather than passively watching someone else model.
2. Macabacus. Macabacus is primarily an Excel-based functionality suite. It is so good I wrote an entire blog post on how it helps in financial modelling; you can read the post here. I am not sponsored by Macabacus, I just like it. Macabacus also provides free financial modeling resources, although in modern times they are more gated and harder to find than they used to be.