Forecasting, Planning & Budgeting Techniques - with Excel

Make informed decisions in a flash

This one day course offers hands-on training surrounding contemporary techniques in Excel which enable us to perform fast and accurate forecasting, planning and budgeting practices as part of the management accounting function. We are introduced to specialist functions that cut through all of the traditional calculations of the past, and bring new and more efficient ways of producing high-quality spreadsheets that facilitate decision making. All within an easy to use format right within Excel.

This course includes how to handle seasonality in a business with many peaks and troughs, and how to make sense of it all. Plus lots to take away after the course for own use.

Venue may change up to 14-days before the course start date. Enquire for dates.

By the end of the course, participants will:

• Become confident in forecasting quickly and accurately, by using tools to make effective decisions
• Make sense of equations like y=mx+b and apply them straight away
• Develop quality decision-making models and build a business plan for further detailed planning
• Run pre-calculated and re-calculated budgeting models and perform sensitivity analysis

Learning outcomes include a greater understanding of:

• Forecasting, planning and budgeting as part of the management accounting function
• Modern quantitative methods used for forecasting
  
  • Identifying trends using industry approved techniques
  • Perform a regression analysis
  • Working with seasonality (a specialist model for dealing with peaks and troughs)
  • Several approaches to predicting future outcomes
• Budgeting & Planning techniques
  
  • The deterministic plan
  • Profit optimisation using a special toolpak
  • Sensitivity analysis and dynamic tables to facilitate budgeting
  • Introduction to stochastic planning
  • Scenario modelling on a budget spread
  • Building several calculated budget models into the memory
• Functions
  
  • The forecasting family
  • Calculating seasonality and time-series
  • AVERAGEIF
  • Constrained random number generation
  • Conditional/Error
  • Array constants
• Bonus topics
  
  • Consolidation options and budget import
  • How to report high-level info on an overview screen
  • Bonus take-away - specialist models for own use
  • Homework topics for further study, including follow-up review and support

  All exercises and project files used on the course will be available to take home.

Spreadsheet authors, managers, company advisers and other members of staff from all functional areas needing to further their Excel skills in developing departmental forecasts, plans or budgets. This course is open to anyone wishing to gain more practical experience in Excel reporting and making use of statistical data.