Budgeting and Financial Forecasting Certificate Series

Course Objectives 

Better Budgeting: Budgeting for Better Decisions

Course Description:

This course starts by outlining the benefits and challenges of budgeting. The course will also provide tips and alternative budget systems that can mitigate these challenges and capture more benefits.

Learning Objectives:

• Identify budgeting benefits and challenges
• Recall the role of the master budget and sub-budgets
• Recall key steps in the budgeting process
• Recognize the pros and cons of budgeting alternative

Capital Budgeting: Adding a New Location

Course Description:

This course is focused on the financial analysis of the location and how a new location fits financially into a company’s larger strategy.

Learning Objectives:

• Identify key revenue and expense items for a new location analysis
• Recognize sources of information for new location projections
• Recall analysis metrics like Net Present Value (NPV), Internal Rate of Return (IRR), and Time to Breakeven
• Recognize Excel What-If functions like Goal Seek, Scenario Manager, and Data Tables

Rolling Forecasts

Course Description:

The best practice use of rolling forecasts begins by clarifying the roles of budgets and forecasts. Specifically, forecast accuracy is increased by separating it from performance management and compensation processes. This improves forecast accuracy.

Learning Objectives:

• Recognize the benefits and challenges of rolling forecasts
• Recall how to build a driver-based forecast
• Identify the steps for building rolling forecasts

Business Environmental Analysis

Course Description:

This course focuses on Finance’s role in environmental analysis. You’ll learn the types of data that should be monitored by Finance. The course then explains popular models for analyzing that data.

Learning objectives:

• Recognize models used in business environmental analysis
• Recall how to perform common-size financial analysis
• Identify sources of environmental information

Cost-Volume-Profit (CVP) and Break-Even Analysis

Course Description:

This course will discuss how CVP analysis is used to calculate profitability and how break-even analysis can help you find a target sales volume.

Learning objectives:

• Recall the CVP and break-even formulas.
• Identify how to calculate the break-even point for multiple products.
• Recognize how costs and profits change across the relevant range of analysis.

Sensitivity Analysis and Scenario Planning

Course Description:

This course will give you insights into how sensitivity analysis and scenario planning can improve your company’s decisions. You’ll also discover tools to obtain and communicate the insights from this analysis.

Learning Objectives:

• Recall how to perform sensitivity analysis
• Describe scenario planning
• Identify ways to improve estimates

Decision Optimization by Maximizing Expected Value

Course Description:

Expected value analysis is a powerful way to distill a massive array of possibilities into a few numbers, which helps clarify the most profitable course of action. This course goes from the basics to important insights for business financial management.

Learning Objectives:

• Recall how to calculate the expected value.
• Recognize decision tools.
• Identify ways to reduce risk.

Calculating the Value of Information

Course Description:

Navigating business decisions in an uncertain world requires knowing when and how much to invest in gathering information. This course provides you with the essential tools to quantify the economic worth of data, ensuring you invest wisely and avoid costly analysis paralysis.

Learning Objectives:

• Recognize forms of Bayes’ theorem and how it helps determine the value of information
• Recall how to calculate the value of information
• Identify practical applications of the value of information

Better Forecasting by Projecting Ranges of Outcomes

Course Description:

This course provides a practical framework for incorporating probability analysis into your financial projections, equipping you with the tools and techniques to make more informed and robust financial forecasts.

Learning objectives:

• Recall the definitions of possibility and probability
• Identify key aspects of distribution curves and flying bar charts
• Recognize methods and tools for probabilistic modeling

Modeling Profitability in Excel

Course Description:

Learn to model profitability and make forecasts in Excel, empowering you to make data-driven decisions for your business. This course delves into key Excel functionalities that give you the tools to analyze past data, build robust financial models, and project future profitability outcomes.

Learning objectives:

• Recall Excel functions for performing profitability analysis.
• Recognize functionality in Excel that can be used for profitability analysis.
• Identify ways to make forecasts in Excel.