Advanced Budgeting Workshop

Overview:

Budgets are an essential financial tool, which aid, planning, decision making, resource allocation, co-ordination and control.
Without the necessary skills Budgets can be badly prepared and/or implemented leading to poor decisions, mid-use of vital resources, poor co-ordination and a lack of control or even too much control resulting in missed opportunities.

The Benefits:

• You will be able to further your professional skills.
• You will be able to make more informed and hence better planning, budgeting and forecasting decisions using various models and software.
• You will make improved budgeting decisions which will increase your importance to your organization
• You will be better placed to liaise effectively with other departments on planning, forecasting & budgeting matters.

Target Competencies:

• Budgeting.
• Building models in Microsoft Excel.
• Forecasting.
• Evaluating proposals.
• Applying Microsoft Excel functions and tools.
• Assessing budgeting process.

The Programme Content:

Budgeting and planning:

• The budget and the functions of management.
• Budget as a planning tool.
• Budgets and the key financial statements.
• The top-down versus bottom-up process.

Budget cycle, process and approaches:

• The budget cycle.
• Characteristics of successful budgeting.
• Making the budget a value-adding activity.
• Top ten problems with budgeting.
• The master budget and its components.
• Operating and capital budgets.
• Best practices in budgeting.
• Creating a user friendly budget template.
• Choosing the proper budgeting approach:

1. Incremental budgeting.
2. Zero-based budgeting.
3. Flexible budgeting.
4. Kaizen budgeting.
5. Activity based budgeting.
6. Rolling (continuous) budgets and forecasts.

Variance Analysis, Reporting, Control and Decision Making:

• Accounting Systems, Accountability and Responsibility Systems.
• Essential Elements of a Costing System.
• Establishing and Implementing a Costing System.
• Undertaking Variance Analysis and Presenting a Variance Report to decision makers.
• Evaluation of the results.
• Making Strategic Decisions based on the Variance Report/Business Planning.

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.

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.

Breakeven analysis and optimization techniques:

• Cost Volume Profit (CVP) analysis.
• Using CVP to reach a target income.
• Single product and multiple products break-even analysis.
• Working with budget constraints.
• Building optimization mode.