Financial Modelling And Decision Making

The modern business professional needs to be able to use spreadsheet software such as Excel to support good business decisions. This course offers training in the enhanced use of spreadsheets to support both short-term and long-term financial decisions. 

The programme takes a practical approach, demonstrating how spreadsheet models are constructed, and how they can be tailored flexibly to specific business scenarios.  

We also explore how such models can be further adapted to capture and reduce business risk. The course offers recommendations to help delegates make their spreadsheet-based dashboards highly relevant, impactful and digestible.

Who Should Attend:

This course is suitable for all business professionals, including Managers, Supervisors and Team Leaders, who wish to develop their Excel and spread sheeting skills in a financial context.  

A working knowledge of Excel is preferable, as the course is designed to improve delegates’ ability to use Excel in a financial context, rather than to teach basic Excel.

Course Profile:

• Modelling short term (operational) financial decisions
• Short-term financial decision making: uses and examples
• Using spreadsheets to model short-term financial decisions
• The benefits and limitations of spreadsheet modelling
• Modelling long term (capital) financial decisions
• Approaches to longer-term financial decisions
• Modelling relevant income, expenditure and cash flow
• Using spreadsheet models for corporate financial governance
• Developing Your Leadership Skills and Tailoring your business model
• Leadership Skills for finance professionals
• Identifying your main business drivers and assumptions
• Sensitivity analysis and stress testing
• Building risk and uncertainty into spreadsheet models
• Identifying uncertainties and making them measurable
• Ways to build quantifiable risk into your spreadsheet models
• Advantages and limitations of spreadsheets in terms of risk
• Modern management reporting
• Using Key Performance Indicators to embed strategic awareness
• Using dashboards to make reporting relevant, impactful and digestible
• The human element: communicating the results of financial modelling

Outcomes:

• Use Excel to support good short-term business decisions
• Use Excel to model longer-term business scenarios and decisions
• Use spreadsheet models can be flexed for different scenarios, sensitivities, and uncertainties
• Incorporate risk into a business model
• Present and communicate dashboards that grab the attention of business colleagues