Financial Analysis and Planning: 5 Day Course

Please see below an outline for our Financial Analysis and Planning course, which is available as an in-house training course for your staff. The course will be tailored to your company needs.

Introduction

Accurate financial analysis and planning is a fundamental element of growth, strategy and overall success. Understanding how to use financial indicators and benchmarks allows you to allocate resources in the planning process to maximise return-on-investment. Financial analysis takes the guess work out of the planning process and enables you to keep tabs on how the business is performing.

It is also important in helping you connect the dots between your strategy (vision, mission, goals and objectives) and what is or is not being achieved in reality by your organization and provides information that can be used in future decision making.

Programme Objectives

Having completed the programme, participants should be able to:

• Understand the Financial Business Environment
• How to analyse different aspects of the company using the right analytical tools.
• Create a financial performance measuring system
• Understand the financial planning process
• Identify and manage business relevant Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s)
• Interpret an organisation, or profit centre using ratios and breakeven analysis
• Use of budgeting, forecasting and planning to evaluate and control the business

Method & Approach

The seminar includes numerous practical examples and real life illustrations, and participative exercises and case studies. It will be presented in a very user-friendly way to suit individuals with varying levels of financial knowledge and experience. Our aim is for this to be an enjoyable learning experience. The training methodology combines presentations, discussions, team exercises and case studies. Delegates will gain both a theoretical and a practical knowledge of all the topics covered. The emphasis is on the practical application of the topics and as a result delegates will return to the workplace with both the ability and the confidence to apply the techniques learned.

All delegates will receive a comprehensive manual of the seminar to take back to the company, which will serve as a useful source of reference in the future. In addition, all delegates will receive a soft copy of the manual and additional material used during the seminar.

Who should attend?

The seminar is designed for business professionals that need or wish to understand the financial aspects of the strategic decision making process. It is crucial for every role at every management level in the organization.

It will also act as a refresher course for financial professionals and others active in the analysis and planning within an organization.

Day 1

The Financial Business Environment

• What is financial decision making?
• Who needs financial data?
• Corporate governance
• Strategic vs. Financial management
• Conflicts of interest: shareholders v managers
• What financial information and data to use?
• The main questions answered by financial analysis
• Framework for financial decision making
• The Balanced Scorecard
• Exercises and case studies

DAY 2

Business Performance Measurement

• Financial statements and their interpretation
• Foundations of business performance measurement
• Tools and techniques
• Key Performance Indicators
• Ratio analysis – Profitability, efficiency, liquidity, operations
• The owner’s point of view
• The lender’s point of view
• The DuPont pyramid
• Economic value added (EVA)
• Predicting financial distress
• Understanding how financial information can mislead
• Case studies

Day 3

Planning for the Business

• The budgeting framework
• SWOT, PESTLE & Porters 5 Forces
• Budget, planning and control
• Top down vs. Bottom up
• Various types of budget
• Incremental
• Rolling
• Zero-based
• Kaizen
• Master budget
• Operational budget (opex)
• Capital budget (capex)
• Cash budget
• The human side of budgeting
• Examples and cases

Day 4

Investment  Decisions

• What is risk?
• Investment appraisal methods – Net present value (NPV), Internal rate of return (IRR), Accounting rate of return (ARR) and payback
• Practical aspects – cash and accounting flows
• Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM)
• How to estimate the cost of equity (Ke) and the cost of debt (Kd)
• Weighted Average Cost of Capital (WACC)
• The difficulties and drawbacks of calculating the cost of capital
• Factors affecting investment decisions
• Exercises

Day 5

Valuing the Business

• Shareholder value
• Value based management (VBM)
• Using valuation methods
• Net asset value
• Price earnings
• EBITDA and multipliers
• Economic valuation techniques (FCF, CCF, CFROI and EVA)
• Corporate restructuring
• Management buy ins (MBIs) and management buy outs (MBOs)

To discuss your training requirements and how this course can work for you, please contact us.