Financial Analysis for Business Performance: Planning, Budgeting, and Forecasting

Strong skills in budgeting and planning are in demand for a variety of roles - whether you’re interested in starting a career as an accountant, business analyst, or consultant, or even if you want to start your own business and need to manage these areas yourself.

This course provides an introduction to financial analysis, showing you the main tools that you have in order to start analysing and optimising for business performance. You will learn to find your way around a balance sheet, understand financial performance analysis, and determine which analysis tools to use for each.

Demonstrate how planning and budgeting help meet business goals

Countless businesses fail because of a poor grasp of their financials, and a lack of proper analysis when making key business decisions. You’ll explore the key function and purpose of business planning and budgeting, and how they contribute towards business goals.

Build your skills in financial analysis

Financial analysis includes interpretation of a business’ financial statements to diagnose profitability, helping the business to make sound decisions with full knowledge of its performance, expected revenue, and margins. You’ll learn to differentiate and deploy different analysis tools to provide business insights.

Create a set of business performance metrics to inform your work

Putting your knowledge into practice, you’ll perform and interpret key analyses to create a set of performance metrics to inform business planning and operations.

This course is designed to support learners who need to engage with large volumes of financial data. This includes entry-level finance or accounting professionals who would like to progress to higher-skill positions, and current finance professionals. It would also be useful for new managers and leaders, as well as business workers and entrepreneurs.

During this course we’ll be using Excel. If you don’t have Excel, you might find this online version useful.

We recommend you use a computer to access this course.

• Introduction to the course and financial analysis
• Welcome to the course
• Introduction to planning, budgeting and forecasting (PBF)
• Fundamentals of effective budgeting
• Week 1 wrap-up
• Financial planning
• Welcome to Week 2
• Fundamentals of effective forecasting
• Technology driven success
• Effective planning, budgeting and forecasting in the digital age
• Week 2 wrap-up
• Analysis tools for business insights
• Introduction
• What is financial analysis?
• Types of financial analysis (Part 1)
• Week 3 wrap-up
• Business planning and operations
• Introduction
• Types of financial analysis (Part 2)
• Set financial targets and performance metrics
• Week 4 wrap-up