Strategic Financial Planning: Financial Analysis, Forecasting and Budgeting

Course details

The business climate is characterized by change and compounded by global influences spawning unforeseen stresses and squeezed margins. Economic uncertainty makes it difficult to set clear goals and objectives and sustain a financial plan which supports them.

Organizations must become more agile with their financial analysis, budgeting and forecasting capabilities as they are now more critical than ever for success and survival during volatile economic times.

The Strategic Financial Planning: Financial Analysis, Forecasting and Budgeting executive program aims to provide you with the analytical skills to build world-class practices into your company’s budgeting and forecasting systems, and describes how to integrate business strategy, budgeting and forecasting into a single process. Moving away from the limitations often associated with traditional static budgeting, this program will have a special focus on the growing trend to “Rolling” budgets and forecasts. You will get to learn firsthand about the “Beyond Budgeting” concept from a member of the Beyond Budgeting Round Table (BBRT) UK.

The Faculty Director, Alan Fell, brings a highly pragmatic, no-nonsense and robustly disciplined approach to the subject. The overall approach is that of a higher-level strategic financial management perspective and is specifically designed for those at management and supervisory level. Throughout the program, there will be reference to many case study examples, including those from Alan’s 40+ years of financial and business experiences, that have helped improve the bottom-line for many of his clients.

This executive program is launched with Financial Modelling for Financial Analysis, Forecasting and Budgeting in Excel. As both programs are designed to help you establish the right finance capabilities for your organization to pursue growth, you are encouraged to send in multiple participants to these two highly popular finance programs.

What You Can Expect

• Overview of the key elements of strategy management and how strategy and finance align. How strategic finance is a key element of overall business strategy and the linkage between strategy and budgets – a common weakness in too many organizations.
• Understand the importance of strategy execution which is often given insufficient management focus. Most organizations fail in successful strategy implementation.
• Gain an understanding of how modern budgetary techniques can provide real support to business managers
• Learn about the “Beyond Budgeting” concept from a member of the Beyond Budgeting Round Table
• A special focus on the growing trend to “Rolling” budgets/forecasts
• Avoid the traditional limitations often associated with historic/static budgeting
• Understand the key aspects of financial analysis and variance analysis
• Learn how to use the different but aligned disciplines of Forecasting and Budgeting to complement each other

Who Will Benefit Most

CEOs, CFOs, VPs, MDs, GMs, Chief Accountants, Cost Controllers, Directors, Managers and Analysts, involved in:

• Financial Planning / Finance Business Partners / Capital Planning
• Management Accounting
• Product Control
• Planning & Budgeting
• Costing
• Forecasting & Financial Analysis
• Auditing & Internal Control
• Risk & Compliance
• Statutory & Regulatory Reporting / Policy Planning
• Business Planning / Strategic Planning / Business Development
• Operations
• Portfolio Management

and anyone with vested interests in forecasting trends at the strategic, tactical, operational and planning levels

Program Outline

DAY 1

• Business And Financial Strategy – And The Linkage To Budgeting
• Aligning Budgeting and Forecasting
• Newer Trends in Budgeting and Forecasting

DAY 2

• Going Beyond Budgeting – A Growing Concept
• Rolling Budgets and Forecasts
• Financial Analysis and Variance Analysis
• Project and Capital Budgeting