Financial Planning & Control

Course details

In today’s business world of increasingly rapid change and intense competitive pressures, successful companies must strive to maintain leading-edge performance management processes. This is especially important in the area of cash flow and value optimization. Successful companies develop clear strategies, which flow throughout the organization through a series of challenging and attainable plans and objectives. After developing its plans and budgets, a successful business must continue to respond effectively to competitive challenges from a continuously changing global economic environment. Performance must be measured on an ongoing basis so that significant deviations to plan and out of control operations are immediately identified and corrective actions are taken. The performance management processes themselves must also be regularly reviewed to ensure that they are evolving in line with corporate best practices.

Course Objectives:

By the end of this course, participants will be able to:

• Create opportunities for their personal development and increased financial awareness
• Understand how businesses create value, develop successful plans and budgets, measure performance, and implement effective control systems
• Develop their knowledge of financial management in order to improve corporate financial performance

Course Outline:

The Financial Framework and Language

• The value model
• Definitions of value
• Value to the investor
• Managing for shareholder value
• Shareholder value creation in perspective
• The three key financial statements
• Balance sheet
• Income statement
• Cash flow statement

Managing Performance Measurement

• A performance management model
• Ratio systems
• Integration of financial performance measures
• Benchmarking financial performance
• Planning

Managing Operating Performance

• Cost behavior and operating leverage
• Budgets
• Activity based budgets
• Control
• Flexed budgets and variance analysis
• Benchmarking operational performance
• Internal benchmarking

Managing Capital

• Cash flow, the time value of money, and DCF
• Standard evaluation terminology
• The key investment analysis indicators
• Applying time-adjusted measures
• Choosing the best method
• Alternative evaluation methods
• Risk management
• Sensitivity analysis
• The key driver of value: cost of capital
• Cost of debt capital and cost of equity capital
• Weighted average cost of capital (WACC)
• Capital restructuring – financial engineering
• Management buy-outs and management buy-ins

Managing Working Capital

• Cash flow, working capital, and the operating cycle
• Optimize not minimize
• Key issues: stocks, debtors, creditors
• Stocks management
• Debtors and credit management
• Creditors management
• The cost of working capital
• Cash improvement