Introduction

Budgeting lies at the heart of business management, yet businesses often encounter financial difficulties as a result of either inadequate planning or errors within the compilation of the budgets.

This programme takes a practical approach to financial planning for the organisation and considers the following:

• The planning process and how to improve it
• The compilation of budgets – who needs to be involved and why;
• How to identify potential problems arising and suggests actions which can be taken
• Ways of improving financial control using effective management reporting

Objectives

• Implement advanced planning and control techniques into your budgeting process
• Integrate the budgeting process with the development of the company’s long-term strategic vision
• Successfully build an integrated planning, budgeting and reporting process
• Apply management tools to the budgeting process that contribute to strategic goals
• Identify key performance indicators for effective and focused decision making
• Increase profitability and performance through stream lined planning and reporting

Day One

Planning for Success

• What are planning strategies?
• Strategy analysis, choice & implementation
• Introducing the Strategy maps
• Corporate value and shareholder value
• The agency problem and corporate governance
• Planning requirements and working capital

Day Two

The Forecasting Process

• Determine the purpose and objective of the forecast
• Statistical analytical tools
• Quantitative analysis and forecasting
• Forecasting techniques
• Causal analysis models – regression analysis
• Using Excel ® to analyse historical data

Day Three

Budgets, Costs and Budgetary Control

• Why do we budget? – the purposes of budgeting
• Planning and control
• Putting the budget together
• Cost behaviour and classification
• Cost / volume /profit (CVP) and ‘what-if’ analysis
• Standard costing
• Flexed budgets
• Variance analysis and the reasons for variances

Day Four

Activity Based Costing (ABC) And Activity Based Budgeting (ABB)

• Activity based costing (ABC)
• Refinement of the costing system
• ABC and cost management
• Design of ABC systems
• The cost hierarchy and cost drivers
• Advantages and disadvantages of ABC systems
• From traditional budgeting to activity based budgeting (ABB)
• The ABB process
• Motivation and the behavioural aspect of budgeting

Day Five

Measuring corporate performance: requirements of a successful performance measurement system

• Broadening performance measurement systems
• The Drive toward Shareholder Value (EVA®)
• Beyond budgeting: integrating financial and non-financial issues
• Introducing the Balanced Scorecard and the key perspective