Forecasting, planning and budgeting techniques - with Excel

SPECIAL OFFER PRICE FOR ICAS MEMBERS
For course dates running before end of September: £300 + VAT

Member price in Scotland: £335.75 + VAT
Non-member price in Scotland: £395 + VAT

Please note, the ICAS member discount will be refunded after checkout.

Member price in England after 30 September: £539 + VAT
Non-member price in England: £634 + VAT

Due to differences regarding external costs, courses outside of Scotland are priced separately. ICAS members are eligible for a discounted price on all courses running in England & Wales.

Overview

This one-day course offers hands-on training surrounding modern-day techniques in Excel that enables 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.

Who should attend

This course will benefit 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. It is open to anyone wishing to gain more practical experience in Excel reporting and making use of statistical data.

What you will learn

• 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.

Questions?

BPP | Tel: 0330 060 3303 | Email: ldicas@bpp.com