Many bad business decision stems from equally bad planning and a lack of appropriately efficient tools within budgeting applications -the direct effect often being a marked slow-down in a business’ development or, at the very least, a negative effect on profitability.

Forecasting budgets in Finance, Sales and Operations plays a critical role in managing business evolution and assessing corporate investment projects. Hence, the development forecasting process and budget monitoring provide mangers with efficient tools needed to maintain a healthy level of growth within a company and measure performance of business activities.

This course aims to assist managers in using budgeting tools more effectively and to better adapt budget monitoring to fit with corporate strategy and identify consequences. Participants will also :

• Budget Structures and pre-budgeting
• Determining budget cycles
• Setting-up procedures for drafting budgets
• Optimizing the budget process: Cost of budgeting process and its effect on profitability

Steps in establishing finance budgets:

• Treasury Budgets
• Coordinating investment and treasury budgets

Steps in establishing operating budgets:

• Sales Budgets
• Production Budgets
• Purchasing Budgets
• and more...

Follow up and budget monitoring:

• Follow-up techniques for operating budgets
• Establishing budget monitoring procedures
• Revised or flexible budgets
• Revealing and interpreting discrepancies :
  • related to entered sales
  • related to direct costs
  • related to indirect costs
• Enhancing productivity and profitability through analysis of discrepancies

"ABB" (Activity-Based Budgeting) Method

• How the notion of activities can contribute to the budgeting process
• Defining cost drivers relevant to activities
• What’s the purpose of the ABB?
• Risks of adopting the "ABB" method

Introduction to Dynamic Follow-Up: Dashboard

• Introduction to the Dashboard
• Use in conjunction with follow ups and budget monitoring
• Selecting Performance "Indicators"
• Analyzing ratios