Certificate in Budget Analysis - Advanced Tools in Budgeting, Forecasting & Reporting

This program has been designed to provide the participants with a broad view and understanding of financial budgeting for enterprises. A discussion of financial statements is a must when considering the creation or analysis of financial budgets. Also, an understanding of how costs behave and how they can be derived and allocated to the various aspects of the business units is also an important part of preparing budgets.

We will be discussing various budgeting methods that have been used and are still in use today in various enterprises. We will also be discussing the methods we can use to assess whether a budget is appropriate and should be approved, and in some cases, whether a project should be undertaken at all.

And finally, no discussion about budgets can be complete without assessing how well a company or sub-unit has actually performed in relation to their budget, and understanding why there are any differences, which there will usually always be.

Upon completion of this course, the participants will be able to:

• Understand the purpose of preparing budgets
• Assess whether a budget should be approved or rejected
• Read annual or budgeted financial statements
• Analyse budgets in various ways
• Better analyse variances between actual and budgeted results
• Prepare budgets using various approaches
• Better choose which budget approach is more appropriate
• Allocate costs to products, services or departments using various methods
• Understand how costs behave and what drives them
• Better forecast revenues and costs
• Use DCF to evaluate a project
• Prepare the master budget