Planning, Forecasting and Budgeting

Short course

In The Rembrandt Hotel, London

£ 1,199 + VAT

Description

  • Type

    Short course

  • Level

    Intermediate

  • Location

    The rembrandt hotel, london

  • Duration

    1 Day

This two-day course provides techniques for checking that your business plans and strategy are financially viable. It describes seven techniques that between them improve the accuracy of any forecast you have to make. It also shows how to budget and how to convert the business plan and the short-term forecasts into a financial statement of expected revenues and costs.

Facilities

Location

Start date

The Rembrandt Hotel, London (London)
See map

Start date

On request

Start date

On request

About this course

Participants attending this programme will learn how to:
• Translate strategy into results
• Generate a business plan that drives organisational activity
• Increase the accuracy of forecasting
• Ensure realistic forecasting
• Allocate appropriate resources
• Set budgets that are quicker to create, encourage the right behaviours
and add value
• Identify and manage key risks, and reflect them in the budget
• Avoid the weaknesses of conventional approaches to budgeting

Middle and senior managers with commercial responsibilities
Business unit heads
All those responsible for planning, forecasting and budgeting
Senior managers who need to know more about budgeting and forecasting without having to know the intricacies of company finance

A member of staff will contact you to help with your booking.

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Reviews

Subjects

  • Budgeting
  • Forecasting
  • Planning
  • Planning and Business
  • Pharmaceutical Management
  • Management
  • Medical
  • Training budget
  • Conference planning
  • Life Science

Teachers and trainers (1)

David Baines

David Baines

Director of Freeman Baines Consulting

Course programme

Over two intensive days you will develop the skills to:

n Create strategic business plans
n Build tangible improvement plans
n Apply the seven key forecasting techniques
n Understand the link between forecasting and cash flow
n Improve budgets to accurately reflect business strategy
n Track performance and use budgets to manage effectively

Expert trainer

David Baines is a Director of Freeman Baines Consulting. He holds a degree in Electronic Engineering from Imperial College, London, and an MBA from the London Business School. After a career in BT he moved into consulting, becoming a partner in a major UK firm before establishing his own consultancy. In addition to consulting, David develops and presents courses and workshops on a range of topics. He uses his consulting experience to detail approaches that work in practice and that they include the latest trends in management think- ing and techniques. Until its closure in April 2012, he was an Associ- ate of the National School of Government, working in the fields of organisational development, management development and skills and managing change. He has written several management handbooks and is credited with many articles in management journals.

Delivery style

Participants will learn by active participation during the programme through teaching sessions, the use of practical exercises and group discussions.

09.00 u 09.30 u

10.15 u

11.15 u 11.30 u

Refreshments

The conventional annual budget

• What do we mean by the conventional annual budget?

• Its perceived weaknesses, such as giving poor value; slowing reactions when we need to respond rapidly; forcing same-as-before when we should be more radical

One solution to the conventional budget: stop budgeting!

• Benefits claimed for this radical approach

  • What would go in the budget’s place? -

    Case study: Svenska Handelsbanken

  • What might finance do instead of budgeting to add yet more value?

    Refreshments

    Ways to improve the budget

    • Rolling forecasts and budgets

• Ensuring the budget reflects the strategy

o timing: reviewing the strategy just before setting the budget

o how continuous budgeting helps the timing

  • Making sure that plans for change - both their costs and their impact - are fully integrated in

    the budget

  • Improving the budget-setting process

o getting the high-level budget broadly right before plunging into detail

• Activity-based budgeting
o understanding how costs are driven in order

to model the finances of the organisation and create rapid revisions

Lunch

Using the budget to manage effectively

• Incorporating business plans accurately in the budget

• Incorporating business-as-usual in the budget

Refreshments

Getting effective budget accountability

• The nature of accountability
• Identifying the underlying reasons for variances • Making budget reviews effective

o picking the key performance measures for tracking progress

o the importance of measuring outputs as well as inputs in reviewing performance

o reporting performance and having a robust process for doing something about deviations from plan

Summary and final questions

Close of course

13.00 u 14.00 u

15.15 u 15.30 u

17.00 u

Planning, Forecasting and Budgeting

£ 1,199 + VAT