Financial & Managerial Accounting for Non-Financial Managers: Beyond the Basics

Use financial analysis to support your key strategic business, management and resource allocation decisions. Ideal for leaders who make key financial resource decisions and require a formal process for conducting financial analysis.

Accounting is the scorecard of any business and correctly understanding financial information will help you measure performance, plan future action and make better business decisions. This course is designed for any leader who has received some basic exposure to accounting and financial statements, and wants to apply more advanced techniques into their everyday decision making process.

The Best Part:

You will receive a detailed framework for analyzing financial statements which will allow you to apply your course learnings around your own planning and capital budgeting issues.

Who Should Attend

• Directors, vice-presidents and divisional managers responsible for the profit and performance of their departments
• Business owners, partners and general managers who need to regularly evaluate their organizations financial stability
• Managers who oversee organizational budgets and capital cost decisions
• Investment planning professionals who need a system for analyzing business performance and shareholder value
• Those who have previously attended SEEC's What The Non-Financial Manager Needs To Know About Financial and Managerial Accounting and who wish to further expand their skills

What You Will Learn

1. Understand how accounting reveals the 'scorecard of a business'
2. Study operating costs to identify how a business is competing
3. Use a turn-key financial statement analysis framework
4. Introduce balanced scorecard measures to improve every departments' performance
5. Support your business decisions with sound financial back-up
6. Develop a methodology in analyzing financial statements and the financial strength of an organization
7. Practice analyzing financial performance in a live case environment
8. Understand why managers need a balanced scorecard to manage value creation
9. Design an activity based costing system that links resource costs to the key activities the organization performs
10. Understand the financial techniques used by an organization to assess capital projects
11. New innovations in strategic management accounting and decision-making
12. Identify what financial information you regularly need and a turnkey process to get it
13. Discuss new changes to financial reporting practices for businesses

Program Content

PART 1 – Using Financial Information for Key Management and Strategic Decision-Making

What Financial Statements Tell Us About Business Performance, Problems and Future Health

• How accounting is the scorecard of business
• Translating the activities of an organization into a set of objective numbers that reveal a firm's performance, problems and prospects
• Key steps to properly interpreting the numbers
• Evaluating costs and customer profitability
• Making key resource allocation and capital decisions
• Measuring performance across all departments using a balanced scorecard

PART 2 – Financial Accounting

A Guide to Understanding Key Financial Statements

• Balance sheet
• Income statement
• Statement of cash flows

Conducting Financial Statement and Ratio Analysis

• Introduction to the financial statement analysis framework
• Review the calculation and interpretation of key financial ratios
• Hands-on exercise: participants, working in groups, will apply the financial statement analysis framework to a publicly traded corporation
• What key opportunities, problems and issues emerge?

PART 3 – Managerial Accounting

Shareholder Value and Responsibility Accounting

• Defining shareholder value and its application to business
• Calculating the cost of capital
• Discuss methods of improving shareholder value

The Balanced Scorecard Approach to Improving Business Results

• Improving business strength by setting standards in all areas of your organization
• The purpose and framework of balanced scorecard
• Hands-on exercise: present the application of the balanced scorecard to a business organization

Analyzing Your Costs Using Activity Based Costing

• How managing cost impacts every aspect of a business
• The short-comings of traditional costing systems
• Understanding the components of cost
• Designing an activity based costing system for an organization

A Manager's Guide to Effective Capital Budgeting

• Supporting your key resource decisions using a forward capital budgeting approach
• The financial techniques used in making capital budgeting decisions
• Hands-on exercise: application of capital budgeting techniques

Program Wrap-Up: Putting It All Together

Instructors