A good understanding of the finance of your organization is key to being able to help it move forward. Whether you are managing a division, a team or work in an expert role, a solid basic understanding of your organization’s financial aspects greatly enhances your capabilities to be more effective and contribute to its future-proofness. This compact two-day program provides you with those essentials in financial knowledge and insights.
“The program gives a good starting point for assessing financial statements, budgets and business cases.”
Policy Advisor, Ministry of Finance, The Netherlands
Program components:
Analyzing and interpreting financial accounting statements
While every organization has to subscribe to a Financial Accounting model, it is rarely a good model to base business decisions upon. Simply, the information comes too late and is limited by certain concepts. However, as it is often used to evaluate business performance, it will be discussed in detail as to understand how to overcome its limitations.
Introducing Discounted Cash Flow analysis and the time value of money
Participants will acquire a hands-on framework with which they can analyze and interpret any organization’s financial statements.
Understanding finance and performance
The real link of accounting and finance to the performance of organizations is mapped out. It is crucial that managers understand this connection in order (to be perceived) to be delivering value to their organizations.
Management accounting and performance
While Financial Accounting is compulsory, Management Accounting is not. However, organizations with excellent management information systems have a significant competitive advantage. When an organization is under pressure, a reflex reaction is often to slash costs. This will inevitably erode the intangible value of the organization. What could be more creative approach to identify ways of improving performance?
Making investment decisions
Current developments in the field of behavioral finance help to understand better ways to forecast and signal common pitfalls in decision-making. How to understand and use these as a manager? And which financial decision tools are at your disposal to make decisions? While valuations most often rely on discounting future cash flows, other valuation methods will also be discussed.
At the end of the program, a wrap-up session will facilitate participants to assess their most important learnings in relation to their own role and organization.
How you will benefit
- Break through the barrier of finance language
- Understand the basic accounting model and its limitations
- Analyze and interpret financial statements within the context of your industry
- Grasp what drives the most common errors in business and how to avoid them
- Identify risks and understand the options available to manage risk
- Apply management accounting tools to business problems
- Understand the budget process and forecasting techniques
- Link financial objectives to strategy
- Identify key value drivers to help manage the value of a business
- Understand different valuation techniques and respective benchmarks
- Obtain essential tools and techniques in presenting a business case
2 days
| Day 1 | 09:00 – 17:00 |
| Day 2 | 09:00 – 17:00 |
Is this program not the right fit for you?
We offer other programs which you might find more interesting or useful, such as:
1. Analyzing and interpreting financial accounting statements
- Understanding the accounting process
- Applying the fundamental accounting concepts
- Tools used to identify ‘value’
- Why ‘Cash is King’
- Common ratios to assess the financial risk of the organization
- Understanding commonly used words and acronyms, e.g. EBITDA, ROCE, CFROI
- Learning the limitations of the traditional accounting model and how to overcome them
2. Introduction to Discounted Cash Flow analysis and the time value of money
3. Understanding Finance and Performance
- Linking accounting to strategy
- How risk management drives value
- How value drivers are identified and what benefits they deliver
- The most commonly applied valuation tools
4. Management Accounting and Performance
- Understanding what drives a company’s ‘bottom line’
- Analyzing it from a customer perspective
- Customer profitability analysis
- A measurement system to include both financial and non-financial metrics
- Managing risk and building certainty to add value
- Analyzing break-even and contribution analysis
- Identifying incremental cash flows
5. Making Investment Decisions
- Discounted Cash Flow analysis (DCF)
- Net Present Value (NPV) of an investment
- Forecasting cash flows
- Measuring the required rate of return – Cost of Capital, WACC, IRR
6. Wrap-up session
The Finance for Non-Financial Managers program is suitable for all types of highly-educated, non-financial professionals. It endows non-financial managers and experts with the insights and tools to understand ‘the numbers’ to help them make better decisions. And a solid basic understanding of the organization’s financial aspects greatly strengthens the capabilities to be more effective and contribute to its future-proofness.
Other programs that might interest you:
