Finance and Accounting for Non-Financial Professionals

Training Outline

Introduction

• Introductions and course objectives
• Participants’ own needs and wants from the course

The Balance Sheet

• Understanding different Assets and Liabilities
• About Fixed Assets
• Current Assets – what they are and how to improve
• Current Liabilities – what they are and how to improve them
• Benchmarking and comparators
• Key Ratios and trends
• About Gearing

The Income and Expenditure Account (or Profit and Loss Account)

• The key components of the Income and Expenditure Account
• Analysing Key ratios and trends
• Managing different types of Costs and their behaviour
• Analysing income streams
• Improving Profitability and Productivity
• The Power of 1%
• Profit/Surplus and Cashflow are different things!

Management Accounts

• What Management Accounts should tell us
• How these figures contribute to overall performance
• Managing the cashflow as well as the costs
• Managing variances and making any necessary improvement

Using ratios to benchmark our performance

• How to use the key ratios to benchmark our performance
• Recognising areas where performance is slipping, and which need management attention

Generating ideas to improve financial performance, including people’s productivity

• Identifying and investing more in high performing assets and activities
• Identifying and improving underperforming assets and costs

Moving from Analysis to Forecasting

• The principles of Forecasting and Budgeting
• Revenue Budgets
• The strengths and problems of traditional budgeting methods
• 2 other approaches which can complement and improve traditional budgeting methods
• Budgeting for Projects – how to do a Cost-Benefit Analysis
• Capital expenditure
• Cost of Capital issues and the time value of money
• Where budgeting can go wrong and how to avoid the principal problems

Understanding the jargon

• A free discussion clarifying any remaining questions about terminology and jargonBenchmarking and comparators

Training Style

The programme is designed to deliver knowledge and enhance participants’ skills via presentations, case-studies, practical examples, real-life simulations. Participants will also benefit from customised feedback at the end of the programme and take away the knowledge gained to be transferred to their workplace. Most of the training’s time will be invested in analysing a real-life case study that will help participants understand how to solve problems in similar situations.