Forecasting, planning and budgeting techniques - with Excel

Member price in Scotland and Online Live: £335 + VAT
Non-member price in Scotland: £395 + VAT

Member price in England: £539 + VAT
Non-member price in England and Online Live: £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.

Timing: 9.30am-4.30pm

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.

Information for Online Live dates

Please read the following guidance carefully, which applies only if you are attending this course online:

• In addition to the Online Classroom, you will need to have your own version of Excel open to complete the exercises
• It does prove to be challenging to follow-on with the exercises using only 1 screen as you will need to be regularly switching between open windows. We recommend to either:
  • Extend from a computer to a 2nd screen - please refer to this link for guidance on how to correctly setup a second monitor https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4340331/windows-10-set-up-dual-monitors or
  • Use 2 computers, or
  • Use a tablet for the online classroom and a computer for the Excel
• Please note that our courses are based on Excel for Windows and it is recommended that you are using at least Excel 2010 or a later version. MAC users are welcome but please note that there may be some tools and functionality that will differ from what is being presented. The presenter will accommodate for MAC versions on the course.

Questions?

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