A one-day workshop (virtual or classroom)
Key financial skills are not as difficult to learn as many people believe.
Are your non-financial management team held back by weak financial skills?
Managers in all parts of the organisation are finding they need some degree of financial know how to cope with the responsibility placed on them as business managers and key decision-makers. The key financial skills are not as difficult to learn as many people believe, and our one-day programme makes finance accessible for everyone. This expert one-day workshop covers the fundamentals of finance and helps non-financial managers to improve weak financial skills, enabling them to think and use finance naturally.
Learning Objectives
- Understand fundamental business finance concepts
- Understand the vital difference between profit and cashflow
- Evaluate pricing decisions based on an understanding of the nature of business costs and their impact on gross margin and break-even sales
- Use powerful analytical tools to measure and improve the performance of your own company and assess the effectiveness of your competitors
- Understand the role of business finance in formulating and implementing competitive business strategy
- Test and implement – with a focus on continuous performance improvement
Workshop information
Workshop outline
1. Business and finance fundamentals
- The objectives of the firm: delivering value to shareholders and key stakeholders
- Understanding the drivers of shareholder value
- Who uses financial statements and why
2. Basic principles
- Understanding business funds flow
- Understanding and using the balance sheet
- Understanding and using the profit statement
- Recognising the vital difference between profit and cashflow
- What financial statements can and cannot tell us
3. Managing and improving cashflow
- What is working capital and why is it so important?
- Understanding how working capital drives business growth
- Understanding and avoiding the over-trading trap
- Managing and improving business cashflow
4. Managing and improving profit
- Understanding how profits generate cashflow
- Understanding cost behaviour
- Understanding gross margin and break-even
- How common pricing methods affect profit
- Improving profit – effective and defective strategies
5. Measuring and managing business performance
- Measures of financial performance and strength
- Investor behaviour: the risk and reward relationship
- Return on investment (ROI): the ultimate measure of business performance
- How profit margin and net asset turnover drive return on net assets
- Why some companies are more profitable that others
- Why great companies fail – what happened to Kodak?
6. Working with finance
- The business planning and budgeting cycle
- Monitoring and managing business performance
- Combining financial and non-financial performance measures
- Understanding and using key performance indicators
