Improve your understanding of financial management and how to use financial statements to improve your decision making.

Decisions employees make daily in business often have a notable impact on the organisation's financial standing.

However, many people do not understand the importance of assessing how their decisions impact the organisation's bottom-line. Not being able to interpret financial statements fuels this lack of understanding.

This four day programme is for those who want to improve their understanding of the financial ramifications of their decisions – whether these relate to an impact on the income statement, balance sheet or cash-flow statement. Through a mixture of classroom lectures, practical exercises and interpretation of financial statements, this course will help delegates to ‘lift the veil’ surrounding financial data.

Who should attend?

• This programme is designed to provide managers in non-financial positions with a practical understanding of finance and accounting; and
• It is assumed that delegates will have no formal accounting or finance knowledge prior to attending this programme.

How you will benefit:

At the end of this programme, you should be able to:

• Plan more effectively as to take the financial impact of your decisions into consideration;
• Identify what causes and drives costs;
• Gain insight into working capital management;
• Apply key ratios and performance measures;
• Understand growth, cash-flow and profitability considerations;
• Implement the concept of contribution and marginal costing;
• Calculate discounted cash-flow and capital costs; and
• Comprehend the principles of valuation and value creation from an economic perspective.

Key Focus Areas:

Day 1:

• Introduction to annual financial statements;
• Judgmental issues / notes and policies; and
• Case studies analysis.

Day 2:

• Recap of day 1 and introduction to costing;
• Absorption costing / cost allocations;
• Marginal costing; and
• Break-even analysis.

Day 3:

• Measuring performance;
• Working capital management;
• Financial planning and growth; and
• Discounted cash flows.

Day 4:

• Case study analysis;
• Capital costs;
• Valuation principles; and
• Creating value.