Why Finance Matters

• Demystifying financial jargon
• Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP)
• Accountability and responsibility for financial information

The Key Building Blocks of Financial Control

Decoding the profit and loss account

• Differentiating income, operating and capital expense items
• Putting the pieces together to measure profit and business success
• When a sale becomes a sale: sales recognition

Analysing the balance sheet

• Evaluating the worth of an established business
• Distinguishing between fixed and current assets and liabilities
• Depreciation and amortisation
• Linking the profit and loss account to the balance sheet
• Shareholder equity: What is it and why does it matter?

Cash Flow: The Lifeblood of Organisations

Making the key connection between business activity and cash flow

• Differentiating between cash flow, profit and net worth
• Connecting cash management to line management
• Credit and cash flow—maximising benefits and minimising costs
• How much cash is enough?
• Generating unique information from cash flow statements

The importance of depreciation and amortisation

• How depreciation impacts your budget over time
• Methods for calculating depreciation
• Advantages and disadvantages of various key methods
• Impacting the management budget
• Where depreciation rules come from

Managing a Cost Center

Overview of costing methods

• The difference between absorption and marginal costing
• Activity-based costing (ABC)
• Costing as the basis for unit pricing
• Analysing costs to gain competitive advantage
• Distinguishing between direct and indirect costs

Selecting the best costing method

• Break-even analysis
• Costing in service industries
• Costing with incomplete information

A Manager's Guide to Budgeting

Recognising that budgets are more than numbers

• Budgeting as sociology, not accounting
• The politics of getting a budget approved
• The relationship between a well-designed budget and how others measure your performance
• Managing effectively within budgeting constraints
• Making the budget work for you

Comparing budget approaches

• Top-down
• Bottom-up

Types of budgets

• Incremental
• Zero-based
• Rolling
• Others
• Developing the budget numbers

Budgeting as a planning and control tool

• Controlling and evaluating the business using the budget
• Dealing with limiting factors
• Budget process and coordination
• Forecasting sales revenues and expenses
• Adjusting the budget to reality

Pulling It All Together

• Applying financial tools and concepts in the real world
• Evaluating a company's health through its annual report
• Recognising potential traps in creative accounting
• Simple tools to determine whether you are working for the next Enron
• Learning from recent examples