Overview
Course duration: 1 day.
Ideal for new and existing budget holders who want to learn how to take the pain out of managing budgets:
- Reducing the time to produce a budget.
- Dealing with opportunities in the face of budget restrictions.
- Including contingencies for future uncertainty.
This course gives delegates the skills to manage departmental budgets, monitor divisional costs and apportion department expenses on an appropriate basis.
Is it right for me?
Suitable for budget holders, cost centre managers, and those who manage department or event budgets who wish to acquire first principles or refresh ideas and approaches.
This course deals with management accounting. If you are also interested in financial accounting (Profit and Loss, Balance Sheet analysis etc), then you may want to consider as an alternative, one of the following two-day courses that cover both those areas.
For managers: Finance for Non-financial Managers
For Office Professionals: Making Sense of Finance
What will I learn?
By the end of this course you will be able to:
- Review the benefits and drawbacks of different budgeting methods, and when to use each approach.
- Use a structured approach to prepare a budget.
- Understand how costs behave to help with budgeting for expenditure.
- Understand management accounting methods, and which methods we use for budgeting and for evaluating unbudgeted opportunities.
- Budget appropriately for risk and defend budgeted contingencies.
- Budget and plan for stock ordering.
- Manage financial performance, understanding variances and taking action to achieve your budget and objectives.
- Manage costs in seasonal or cyclical businesses.
- Simply assess the viability of entering new markets or developing new products.
What will it cover?
Budgeting Preparation
- Overview of the budget process
- Case study: reviewing a simple budget scenario
- Being clear about initial assumptions and limiting factors
- Knowing where to find information that might be needed
- Analysing potential income and expenditure: what events and occurrences do we need to consider? Internal, external, definite and uncertain
- Nature and behaviour of costs
- Understanding different costing methods and their relevance to decision making and budgeting
- Stock forecasting and how to calculate the minimum quantity needed
- Apportioning overheads
- Budgeting for risk and contingencies
- Break-even analysis for simple decision making
Facing the Actuals
- What are the variances and why are they important?
- The budget is the plan, i.e. understanding the need to proactively work towards budget and adhere to budget.
- Comparing actual costs to monthly and year to date budget
- Understanding the significance of changes in variances
- Flexing the budget
The Cash Budget
- Why they are needed. Do high profits necessarily mean everything is going well?
- Case study: preparing a cash budget
Presenting the Departmental Budget
- Giving clear information
- Presenting the main variables
- Getting agreement - ensuring you agree an achievable budget in the face of potential budget cuts
Personal Development
- Action planning - the essential next steps
- Continuous professional development - what next?
Further courses to consider
Introduction to Company Accounts
Trainer Profile
Tracey Grice
Budgeting can be confusing but my aim for this course is to break down the process in to manageable chunks. Delegates go away understanding the whole budgeting process and feel confident to apply the principles back in the workplace.
The course is very practical and informative and gets delegates working through examples to make the learning an enjoyable experience.
I encourage delegates to challenge both their existing practices and the course exercises in order for them to achieve optimum results on their own budgets.
The Faculty
Along with Lindsey Byrne, Tracey Grice is part of the dedicated faculty team who will deliver this course.
View our trainers' profiles.
Recent delegates have said:
“Tracey was an excellent trainer.”
Testimonial
Itoro Assam, Finance Officer
Roehampton University
I attended the 'Managing Budgets Effectively' course and thought it was extremely enlightening. I thoroughly enjoyed Variance Analysis, Forecasting and Reforecasting. The tutor's presentation was also very good and I have since put much of what I learnt to practice in the University.