Improving budgeting and forecasting effectiveness (60545091) - Learning manual

Overview

This course is designed to enhance your knowledge of organisation structures, as well as improve your budgeting and forecasting skills for core business operations. You will be provided with ideas for improving the effectiveness of your organisation’s budgeting and forecasting. 

The role of budgeting is addressed, along with the most common criticisms of budgeting and alternative suggestions for the allocation of resource inputs and for determining output expectations are provided.

This course also aims to provide you with conceptual and technical skills to develop better and more informed estimates and forecasts for operational activities and the financial consequences of organisation performance. Being aware of the different tools available for forecasting is a useful foundation for performing more robust analysis, review and forecasting in your organisation.

Key topics:

• The business/budgeting framework
• The macro-economic environment
• Is budgeting relevant?
• Forecasting, Time series forecasting
• Regression analysis - Causal forecasting, Goal seeking and solver
• Forecasting - a strategic view

This course consists of one hard copy learning manual and one online assessment.

Want to know more? Click below to view a sample of the learning manual:

Objectives

• Assess the purpose of budgeting and its relationship to forecasting
• Evaluate current budgeting practice, its usefulness and its criticisms
• Discuss the role and benefits of a forecasting system
• Apply time series and causal (regression) based forecasting techniques to develop forecasts of core business operations
• Demonstrate scenario analysis using Goal Seek and Solver functions
• Develop strategic forecasting models using a top-down approach

Audience

This course is designed for people working in corporate entities, small to medium enterprises and not-for-profits, in areas such as management accounting, financial management and financial control.