Certificate in Advanced Budgeting and Forecasting

Budgeting and planning

• Strategy development framework
• The three horizons of growth model
• Strategic budgeting and resource allocation
• Growth-share matrix
• Nine-box matrix
• Budgets and the key financial statements

Budget cycle, process and approaches

• The budget cycle
• Characteristics of successful budgeting
• Making the budget a value-adding activity
• Top ten problems with budgeting
• Choosing the proper budgeting approach:
• Incremental budgeting
• Zero-based budgeting
• Flexible budgeting
• Kaizen budgeting
• Activity based budgeting
• Rolling (continuous) budgets and forecasts
• The master budget and its components
• Operating and capital budgets
• Best practices in budgeting
• Creating a user friendly budget template

Forecasting techniques

• Forecasting models
• Qualitative and quantitative methods
• Steps in developing forecasting models
• Time series and trend analysis
• Data conditioning techniques
• Exponential smoothing and moving averages
• Simple and multiple regression analysis

Modeling projected financial statements

• Micro and macro factors
• Forecasting sales
• Estimating market demand
• Estimating company demand
• Developing sales forecast
• Forecasting cost of sales
• Forecasting operating expenses
• Forecasting key assets and liabilities accounts
• Modeling the income statement forecast
• Modeling the balance sheet forecast

Advanced capital budgeting evaluation techniques

• Business risk and cost of capital
• Classifying investment projects
• Cash flow estimation
• Analyzing investment and operating cash flows
• The time value of money concept
• The required rate of return
• Net Present Value (NPV)
• Internal Rate of Return (IRR)
• Multiple internal rates of return
• Modified Internal Rate of Return (MIRR)
• Profitability Index (PI)
• Payback period and discounted payback period
• Capital rationing
• Comparing and evaluating techniques
• Sensitivity and risk analysis

Breakeven analysis and optimization techniques

• Cost Volume Profit (CVP) analysis
• Using CVP to reach a target income
• Single product and multiple products breakeven analysis
• Working with budget constraints
• Building optimization models