By the end of this course, delegates will be able to:

• Learn costing and budgeting terminology used in business.
• Understand the importance of a well-defined costing and budgeting process.
• Determine full costs of outputs for the goods and services provided.
• Master traditional techniques and recent best practices
• Link finance and operation for budgeting purposes and strategy execution
• Learn how to build a comprehensive performance measurement system.
• Understand the budgeting methods most useful to them.
• Understand how to construct a relevant and efficient budget.
• Learn to evaluate the usefulness of costing techniques in accurately calculating and ensuring profitability.
• Reinforce and expand their knowledge by linking budgeting to strategy and performance measurement.
• Broaden their understanding by linking financial and operational issues.

This course is a must for all professionals who need to master their budgetary skills by learning how costs behave so that realistic business plans can be produced. The course will enable participants to:

• Identify the key factors required to understand business processes.
• Develop proper system of cost analysis for budgeting purposes.
• Master the budgeting and financial skills required for better decision-making.
• Identify sources of financial and operational data to support the budgeting process.
• Learn new best practices to manage organizational performance.

•   Budgeting and Its Role within the Management Process
• The role of budgeting within management accounting
• Linking costing and budgeting to strategy and performance measurement
• The process of value creation: implications for budgeting
• What is a budget and why costing is fundamental
• Budgets – the financial expression of the operating plan
• Linking financial and operational issues
• Behavioral implications of budgeting
• Case discussion and examples
• The Framework for Budgeting
• Elements of the budgetary framework
• Key concepts and terminology
• Advantages and disadvantages: critical issues to be discussed
• Overview on the financial statements
• Balance sheet, Income statement and cash-flow statement
• Introducing cost analysis for decision making
• The importance of understanding full costs
• The importance of understanding full costs
• Case discussion and examples
• Costs Analysis for Budgetary Purposes
• Costing for budgeting: Why?
• Cost terms and purposes
• Fixed and Variable costs
• Cost, profit and volume relationships
• The key concept of contribution margin
• Direct and indirect cost – the avocation problem
• Traditional methods vs. Activity-based costing
• Case discussion and examples
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• Flexible Budgets and Variance Analysis
• Budgeting for management control purposes
• Describe the difference between a static budget and a flexible budget
• Compute flexible-budget variances and sales-volume variances
• Explain why standard costs are often used in variance analysis
• How to interpret variance analysis
• Integrate continuous improvement into variance analysis
• Case discussion and examples
• Is budgeting enough?
• Beyond Budgeting: Broadening Performance Measurement Systems
• Shortcomings of traditional approaches to budgeting and measurement
• Linking financial to operational issues
• The balanced scorecard and six-sigma
• Linking strategy execution to performance measurement
• Financial perspective, customer perspective
• Internal business process perspective, learning and growth perspective
• Developing and adapting the scorecard
• Case study illustration and discussion