Certificate in Advanced Budgeting and Forecasting

Course overview

Course outline

1. 1Day 1: Budgeting and Planning

   • Strategy development framework
   • The three horizons of growth model
   • Strategic budgeting and resource allocation
   • Growth-share matrix
   • Nine-box matrix
   • Budgets and the key financial statements
2. 2Day 2: Budget cycle, process, and approaches

   • The budget cycle
   • Characteristics of successful budgeting
   • Making the budget a value-adding activity
   • Top ten problems with budgeting
   • Choosing the proper budgeting approach:
   • Incremental budgeting
   • Zero-based budgeting
   • Flexible budgeting
   • Kaizen budgeting
   • Activity-based budgeting
   • Rolling (continuous) budgets and forecasts
   • The master budget and its components
   • Operating and capital budgets
   • Best practices in budgeting
3. 3Day 3: Forecasting Techniques

   • Forecasting models
   • Qualitative and quantitative methods
   • Steps in developing forecasting models
   • Time series and trend analysis
   • Data conditioning techniques
   • Exponential smoothing and moving averages
   • Simple and multiple regression analysis
   • Forecasting components of financial statements
4. 4Day 4: Advanced Capital Budgeting Evaluation Techniques

   • Business risk and cost of capital
   • Classifying investment projects
   • Cash flow estimation
   • Analyzing investment and operating cash flows
   • The time value of money concept
   • The required rate of return
   • Net Present Value (NPV)
   • Internal Rate of Return (IRR)
   • Multiple internal rates of return
   • Modified Internal Rate of Return (MIRR)
   • Profitability Index (PI)
   • Payback period and discounted payback period
   • Capital rationing
   • Comparing and evaluating techniques
   • Sensitivity and risk analysis
5. 5Day 5: Breakeven Analysis and Optimization Techniques

   • Cost Volume Profit (CVP) analysis
   • Using CVP to reach a target income
   • Single product and multiple products breakeven analysis
   • Working with budget constraints
   • Building optimization models