Program Objective:

Almost everything in business eventually boils down to the money sign. Hence, irrespective of the primary area of work every manager needs a basic grounding in finance and accounting. As the managers from non-finance domains move up and assume responsibilities to make decisions impacting top-line, margins, bottom-line, credible budgeting, cost-benefit evaluations and capital allocation, inability to understand and apply finance ideas in the decision making will impair the competitive capabilities of organizations and hence its financial performance.

This 3-Day program seeks to enable non-finance professionals to use financial numbers with greater understanding, efficiency and confidence by exposing them to essentials in understanding and interpreting financial statements, managing costs, evaluating short and long term investment decisions and budgeting.

Since the idea of ‘cost’ is appealing to common sense, this program commences with building a foundation in measuring and analysing costs. This is followed by a discussion on how financial statements are prepared and analysed, in the process showing how costs impact the overall financial performance of a firm.

Having prepared the ground to deal with number crunching, the participants are introduced to the ideas of capital expenditure planning and working capital management. Finally, the program winds up by linking all these ideas to controlling financial performance through a system of budgeting and variance analysis.

By the end of the program, participants will be able to:

• Deepen their knowledge of how costs are measured and analyzed.
• Develop an understanding of what financial statements are and how they are analyzed and interpreted.
• Learn the basics of making investment decisions in capital assets and current assets.
• Use budgeting and variance analysis techniques to control costs.

Who Should Attend?

• All middle level and senior non-finance managers.
• Owners and identified successors of family businesses.
• Accountants who have risen from entry level and looking for furthering their professional skills.

Program Outline

Module 1: Cost Measurement and Cost Analysis

This module seeks to familiarize the participants with various ways of measuring costs and using certain tools of cost analysis.

• Introduction to cost terms.
• Cost Measurement-Direct/Indirect costs; Variable/Fixed costs; and Average Unit cost.
• CVP Analysis.
• Cost estimation.

Module 2: Understanding Financial Statements

This module firstly familiarizes the participants with the three basic financial statements. Thereafter it builds on this platform a super structure of tools for analysis and interpretation by considering the cases of several MNC’s.

Understanding Financial Statements:

• Linking business activities, users and financial statements.
• Overview of form and content of Balance Sheet, Income Statement and Statement of Cash Flows.

Module 3: Analysing and Interpreting Financial Statements.

• Reformulation of Financial Statements.
• Time series and cross-sectional analysis of income statement and balance sheet ratios.
• ROE, the catchall measure of performance.
• Drivers of ROE.
• Analysis of growth.

Module 4: Introduction to Evaluating Long Term and Short Term Business Investments

How financial resources available to a firm should be allocated to the many possible investment alternatives available is a major issue that corporate executives grapple with often. Should a new plant be built? Equipment replaced? More inventories held? Higher credit extended? The purpose of this module is to look at the solution of an economist in the language of the business manager.

• Project evaluation techniques.
• Financial estimates and projections.
• Time value of money.
• Capital budgeting.
• Cost of Capital and other rates of discount.
• Working capital management.
• General considerations.
• Managing inventory.
• Credit decisions.

Module 5: Cost Control – Budgeting and Variance Analysis

This module emphasizes on understanding the purpose and value of establishing budgets; types of budgeting; importance of evaluating budgets; understanding variances and completing a variance analysis.

• Principles of Budgeting and Cost Control.
• Projection Vs Forecast Vs Budget.
• Introduction to Budget terminologies.
• Preparing static and flexible budgets and Comparing with Actual Performance.
• Variance Analysis.
• How to make budgeting more effective.