Course Code: budgetingforecasting
Duration: 14 hours
Prerequisites:
  • Accounting Fundamentals
  • Excel Crash Course

Audience

  • Pepole who are responsible for financial management, budgeting, and forecasting within their organizations.  This may include professionals working in financial planning and analysis (FP&A), accounting, treasury, financial reporting, corporate development, etc.
Overview:

This financial budgeting course will teach you about the entire budgeting process from start to finish, including how to create a disciplined budgeting culture in your organization, the various methods for building budgets, techniques to analyze results, and how to increase the chances of organizational performance improvements.

This interactive and applied budgeting course enables participants to:

  1. Adopt a disciplined approach to developing budgets
  2. Forecast results with quantitative and qualitative methods
  3. Effectively use variance analysis to track performance
  4. Present results with charts and graphs
Course Outline:

Introduction

  • Course introduction
  • Course learning objectives
  • Instructors

Budgeting Within a Strategic Framework

  • Learning objectives
  • Barriers to strategy execution
  • Translating the strategy into a business plan
  • Interactive exercise 1
  • Balanced scorecards
  • Top reasons to budget
  • What to watch out for
  • Interactive exercise 2

Building a Robust Budgeting Process

  • Learning objectives
  • The master budget
  • 3 categories of budgets
  • Interactive exercise 3
  • Manufacturing company example
  • Retail company example
  • Services company example
  • Where to start with budgeting
  • Steps in the budgeting process
  • Psychology and target setting
  • Top down vs. bottom up involvement
  • Interactive exercise 4

A Practical Guide to Developing Budgets

  • Learning objectives
  • 4 approaches to budgeting
  • Incremental budgeting
  • Activity based budgeting
  • Value proposition budgeting
  • Zero based budgeting
  • Interactive exercise 5
  • Beyond budgeting

Forecasting Techniques

  • Learning objectives
  • Cost types
  • Modified cost types
  • Cost structure and earnings volatility
  • Cost structure exercise template
  • Cost analysis demonstration
  • Breakeven analysis and margin of safety demonstration
  • Sensitivity analysis with data table
  • Interactive exercise 6
  • Cost control matrix
  • Quantitative forecasting methods
  • Forecasting exercise template
  • Moving averages
  • Simple linear regression
  • Excel FORECAST function
  • Equation of a line regression
  • Multiple linear regression overview
  • Multiple regression Excel demonstration
  • Interpreting regression summary output
  • Using the multiple regression equation
  • Interactive exercise 7
  • PEST analysis
  • Porter's 5 forces

Tracking Budget Performance with Variance Analysis

  • Learning objectives
  • What is variance analysis
  • Volume vs. price variance
  • Cost variance
  • Interactive exercise 8
  • Variance analysis exercise template
  • Variance analysis in Excel
  • Variance impact and waterfall chart data
  • Variance waterfall chart in Excel
  • Variance waterfall chart template
  • Root cause analysis
  • Presenting results of variance analysis
  • Interactive exercise 9

Applied Budgeting Tools and Techniques in Excel

  • Learning objectives
  • Budgeting tools exercise templates
  • Goal Seek tool in Excel
  • Solver tool in Excel
  • Consolidate function in Excel
  • Pivot tables overview
  • Setting up a pivot table in Excel
  • Beyond Excel
  • Interactive exercise 10

Conclusion

  • Summary