Planning, budgeting, and forecasting is a three-step strategic planning process that identifies and details an organization’s long- and short-term financial objectives. The finance department of an organization typically oversees the procedure. Planning outlines the company’s financial direction and creates a model of expectations. Budgeting documents how the overall plan will be executed month to month and typically includes estimates of revenue and expenses and expected cash flow and debt reduction while forecasting uses accumulated historical data and market conditions to predict financial outcomes for future months or years.  This training program equips participants with the knowledge and abilities needed to create top-notch strategic planning, forecasting, and budgeting procedures.

Target Participants 

Training on Planning, Budgeting and Forecasting is ideal for a wide variety of professionals, particularly those with direct or indirect budgetary responsibility within a team, department, or division. The training program is also ideal for managers and individuals who handle budgetary, operational, and strategic plans.

Course Duration 

Online      7 Days

Classroom-based     5 Days

What you will learn 

By the end of this course the participants will be able to: 

• Enhance their strategic thinking skills and participation in the integration of the organization’s strategic management and budgeting procedures.
• Utilize forecasting methods that are most suitable for the organization’s strategic planning and budgeting.
• Recognize how costs behave and pinpoint the costing techniques that can be utilized for financial planning, budgeting, and budgetary control.
• Utilize best practices when creating operating, capital, and cash flow budgets and forecasts in accordance with the strategic goals of the organization.

Course Outline 

Strategic Management and Financial Planning 

• Organizational planning framework
• Strategic, tactical, and operational forecasts
• The strategic approach to business planning
• Various strategic and tactical approaches to business planning
• The Links between strategy, forecasting, planning, budgeting, performance measurement
• Capital structure optimization models.

Budget Framework and Budget Development Process 

• Common budgeting approaches/models
• Process flow of an organization
• Budgeting in small/large companies
• Top down vs. bottom-up involvement
• Sources of information
• Revenue and cost drivers
• Relationship between activities, resources, costs, and cost drivers
• Building the budget

Financial Forecasting  

• Introduction to financial forecasting
• Importance of financial forecasting
• Types of financial forecasting
• Steps in financial forecasting
• Financial forecasting techniques

Risk Analysis 

• Types of financial risks
• Financial risk assessment
• Financial risk management strategies

Cost Analysis Techniques 

• Cost behavior and activities
• Fixed and variable costs, direct and indirect costs
• Product costs and period costs
• Cost allocation and absorption of overheads
• Absorption or full costing
• Marginal costing
• Cost-volume-profit (CVP) and ‘what-if’ analysis using Excel
• Activity based costing (ABC) and Activity based management (ABM)

Financial Appraisal and Capital Budgeting 

• The time value of money
• Future values
• Present values
• Discounted cash flow
• Capital investment and project appraisal Techniques.
• Capital rationing.
• Capital budgeting and the profitability index.

Performance Management 

• Monitoring against key performance indicators
• Performance reporting
• Perform variance analysis.
• Action planning

Training Approach 

This training on planning, budgeting, and forecasting is delivered by our seasoned trainers who have vast experience as expert professionals. The course is taught through a mix of practical activities, presentations, group works and case studies.

Training manuals and additional reference materials are provided to the participants.

Certification 

Upon successful completion of this course, participants will be issued a certificate.

Tailor-Made Course 

We can also do this as a tailor-made course to meet organization-wide training needs. A training needs assessment will be done on the training participants to collect data on the existing skills, knowledge gaps, training expectations and tailor-made needs.