Financial Analysis for Business Performance: Reporting and Stakeholder Management

Strong financial analysis is just part of the story - you need to be able to communicate your insights to stakeholders to help them use your data for their decision making. Being able to tell stories with data is a key, and highly desirable skill, within the finance sector and across a range of industries.

This course will show you how you can use various tools - such as Tableau and Excel - to prepare visualisations that speak to a diverse audience and ensure that your insights are used throughout your organisation.

Communicate finance insights to all of your stakeholders

You’ll explain and compare the reporting needs of various stakeholders, and build your understanding of how you can meet those needs with the data and tools you have available. Put that theory into practice by creating repeatable reporting systems that save you time and resources with weekly or monthly tasks.

Create financial reports that support business needs

You’ll learn to build reports that reflect business performance and identify and analyse varying cost types within a business. Then you’ll explore how to recommend optimised cost structures that contribute to business objectives.

Use Tableau and Excel to tell stories with data

Grow your Excel expertise and learn to use it to streamline your work, support analysis, and create meaningful data visualisations that speak to your audience. You’ll learn how to make the most of this market-leading software to make sure that your reports and presentations have maximum impact within your organisation.

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 to financial reporting
• Welcome to the course
• Performance monitoring and reporting processing
• Week 1 wrap-up
• Financial performance reporting
• Introduction
• Creating performance reports
• Presenting performance reports
• Week 2 wrap-up
• Cost types
• Welcome to Week 3
• Introduction to cost management
• Costing methods
• Week 3 wrap-up
• Cost structures
• Introduction
• Standard costing and variance analysis
• Week 4 wrap-up