Business Financial and Accounting Skills

This course addresses key issues, such as cost analysis, continuous improvement of cost assignment, budgeting, management control, and performance evaluation. In so doing, the program pushes delegates to understand the cause-and-effect relationship among business strategy and vision, operational objectives, measures and targets, as well as advanced performance measurement and reporting.

Participants will:

•         Understand the finance and accounting jargon
•         Learn costing and budgeting terminology used in business
•         Determine full costs of outputs for the goods and services provided
•         Master traditional techniques and recent best practices
•         Link finance and operation for budgeting purposes and strategy execution
•         Learn how to build a comprehensive performance measurement system

Management and Financial Accounting: Key Concepts and Terminology

• Identify the major differences and similarities between financial and managerial accounting
• Understand the role of management accountants in an organization
• Linking strategy to planning and costing
• The key role of budgeting and cost control in contemporary organizations
• Towards a cross-functional process-view of the organization
• Understand your processes: integrating financial and non-financial aspects
• Understanding the Financial Statements

Cost analysis

• What is costing?
• Cost concepts and terminology
• Different costs for different purposes
• Fixed Vs Variable costs: the Cost-Volume-Profit analysis model
• Contribution Margin analysis
• Manufacturing vs. non-manufacturing costs
• Period Vs. Product costs: inventory evaluation and control

Traditional vs. Advanced Techniques in Cost-control

• Under-costing and over-costing: the consequences for profitability
• How to refine a costing system?
• Indirect Vs. Direct costs
• Traditional Cost Allocations systems Vs. Activity-Based Costing
• Cost hierarchy & Cost drivers
• Linking resources, activities and management
• Introducing Activity-Based Budgeting and Management

Budgeting: Flexible Budgets and Variance Analysis

• The role of budgeting
• Define the master budget and explain its major benefits to an organization
• Describe the difference between a static budget and a flexible budget
• Compute flexible-budget variances and sales-volume variances
• Discuss the behavioral implication of budgeting
• The budgeting process in your organization: how to improve it?
• Which tools shall we use to complement budgeting and costing?

Measuring Corporate Performance

• Broadening performance measurement systems
• The key role of customer satisfaction and business process reengineering
• Beyond budgeting: integrating financial and non-financial issues
• Introducing the Balanced Scorecard
• The key perspectives
• Introducing the Strategy maps

TRAINING METHODOLOGY

The training methodology combines lectures, discussions, group exercises and illustrations. Participants will gain both theoretical and practical knowledge of the topics. The emphasis is on the practical application of the topics and as a result participant will go back to the workplace with both the ability and the confidence to apply the techniques learned to their duties.