Finance - A Manager's Guide

Unless you understand the financial side of the business, you’re unlikely to make top management. This interactive workshop will introduce methods of creating budgets and show how they are used to monitor and improve financial performance. It will help you to assess the financial strength of potential customers and suppliers, and show how your own activities affect financial performance.

You will benefit because you will understand the terminology used by accounts and finance staff, and will feel more confident when involved with them. The course will help you do your job better and help prepare you for senior management, where financial awareness is crucial.

Your organisation will benefit because people will attain a greater level of understanding and more confidence. The course will help them to prepare more accurate budgets, manage them better and understand their own impact on financial performance. This should result in more profit and/or better use of the resources that they manage.

The training will suit anyone who has to deal with finance in their job. For example it will suit those who deal with suppliers and customers, or those who have recently started to deal with budgets, or who will do so in the future.

• The difference between financial and management accounts.
• Cash flow – the lifeblood of the business.
• Profit – sales are vanity, profit’s sanity.
• Balance sheet – a financial snapshot.
• Ratio analysis and key performance indicators.
• An overview of budgeting – fail to plan, plan to fail.
• The key stages in the budgeting process.
• Profiling the budget.
• Forecasting the year-end position.
• Monthly reporting and variance analysis.
• Taking corrective action.
  

The course director will introduce concepts and techniques, and then ask you to complete exercises. Examples include:

• Individual exercises where you are asked to construct a budget from a set of sample data.
• Pairs exercises where you analyse a set of management accounts and suggest corrective action.
• Group exercises in which you will analyse and interpret annual financial statements.