Financial Reporting: the Current Climate

Course overview

Accounting & Finance are the language of business; understanding and applying this language to your business and to business in general remains the single most valuable competence of management. Prepare yourself by enhancing your personal competence in financial analysis of the past, problem evaluation of today, and budgeting for the future. This programme will challenge you to:

• Learn how to use financial statements to evaluate the financial / strategic performance of an organization
• Understand discounted cash flow (DCF) techniques and their application to financial decision-making
• Use ratios to quickly pinpoint areas of concern
• Identify key success factors, weak financial signals, and strong financial signals in your own industry sector
• Learn the metrics used by the world’ leading companies, how to use them, & why
• Confidently project your firm’s future performance through real-world budgeting

Course objective

• Learn how to understand the content of, and relationships between, financial statements (income statement, balance sheet, and statement of cash flows)
• Learn how to use financial statements to evaluate the financial/strategic performance of an organization
• Identify key success factors, weak financial signals, and strong financial signals in your own industry sector
• Define the value creation/destruction process in mergers and acquisitions from the market perspective and signals to management from the market
• Learn how to build a budget that’s works and the variations
• Identify sources of financial and business data that provide insights into business and financial strategies
• Enhance personal networks of similarly minded high potential personnel

Who should attend?

• Financial professionals from all sectors, who wish to test their high performance and high potential knowledge, skills, and attitudes will benefit from attending this training session
• Similarly other Professionals and Functional personnel, who wish to refresh their financial knowledge base, will obtain a more integrative financial overview

Course outline

• Getting started with financial analysis (what has happened so far)
• Financial performance measurement systems
• Moving beyond the basics in financial analysis
• Sensitivity analysis: how to calculate it & what it tells us
• Evaluation of the information (where we are today)
• Short-term success evaluations process and measures
• Budgeting and the management process (the future)
• Budgets - the financial expression of the operating plan
• Advantages and limitations of budgets
• Completing the budget using the tools we have learned

Training methodology

• Presentation & Slides
• Audio Visual Aids
• Interactive Discussion
• Participatory Exercise
• Action Learning
• Class Activities
• Case Studies
• Workshops
• Games & Role plays