Planning, Forecasting And Budgeting

Are you entirely happy with your planning, forecasting and budgeting processes? Does the business plan do justice to the strategy? Is it an essential management tool or is it gathering dust? Is the revenue forecasting reliable? Is there a continuous process of rolling forecasts or is a major effort required on an ad hoc basis to generate a new forecast when it is obvious to all that the budget is a fiction? If any of these concerns sounds familiar, if you need to review your processes and, most importantly, your thinking, then this seminar is specifically designed to help you.

It starts with the assumption that you already have a business strategy and outlines some techniques for creating business plans that are aligned with this strategy and for checking that the plans – and hence the strategy – are financially viable. Moving on to forecasting, the programme describes seven techniques that between them improve the accuracy of any forecast you have to make.This leads in to budgeting, which should convert the business plan and the sales forecasts in to a financial statement of expected revenues and costs. But many organisations are dissatisfied with the budget as a mechanism of planning and control.This course explores several ways of improving the budget – from getting rid of it altogether to adopting a range of less radical modifications.

Key benefits

• Translate strategy into results
• Generate a business plan that drives organisational activity
• Ensure realistic forecasting
• Allocate appropriate resources
• Set budgets that can be met
• Identify and manage key risks
• Avoid the weaknesses of conventional approaches to budgeting

Above all, this programme will show you how strategy, business planning, forecasting and budgeting should fit together and support one another – and how to make this happen in your own organisation.