Workshop on Financial Modeling for Finance Professionals Using Excel

Program overview:

Microsoft Excel is one of the most powerful software used for analyzing data to make a better decision. It helps in data organization, data analysis, and data interpretation.

Finance professionals are frequently required to prepare management reports, scorecards, and dashboards. Attending this course will help participants used advanced Excel levels tools and features to produce such important reports. The course starts with pivot tables, the most important tool ever created to perform data reporting, analysis and reconciliation. It then continues with high level modeling techniques, integration and report visualization, and it ends with automation that is guaranteed to add value to participants daily and periodic tasks. This course is specifically designed for finance professionals and is the perfect course for those working with budgets on a regular basis.

Note: Good knowledge of Advanced Excel level and introduction to finance is a prerequisite for this course.

For whom:

This course is designed for finance and accounting professionals, management accountants and anyone looking to learn or extend their knowledge of using Excel to assist with financial decision making in a business context.

Learning objectives:

At the end of the program, participants will be able to:

• Use Excel is an essential tool for financial modeling,
• Learn some key models in financial modeling using excel
• Practice rolling forecast using Excel
• Tie up their financial models with dashboard reporting.

Course outline:

Day 1: Fundamentals of financial modeling

• Applications for financial models
• The major differences between financial models and spreadsheets
• Best practice in developing and building financial models
• Getting the best results with Excel

Day 2: Financial models and techniques for forecasting

• Using Excel’s data analysis toolkit
• Avoiding common forecasting problems
• Using moving averages to isolate trends in time series data
• Using linear regression to isolate trends in time series data
• Using exponential smoothing to forecast sales demand
• Building a financial model to make sales forecast
• Using Excel Solver to minimize forecast error
• Using Excel correlation tools to identify links between variables
• Building a financial model to forecast costs
• Understanding the drivers of business cash flow
• Building a financial model to forecast cash flow

Day 3: Financial models for capital investment decision-making

• Principles of capital budgeting
• Common approaches to capital investment decision-making
• Understanding the time value of money
• Principles of discounted cash flow (DCF)
• Understanding and using Excel DCF functions
• Building a financial model for capital investment

decision-making

Day 4: Financial models for forecasting and improving

business performance

• The elements, structure and dynamics of

financial statements 

• Understanding the shareholder value concept
• Measuring profitability with Return on Net Assets (RONA)
• Managing the key drivers of RONA
• Understanding and managing business risk
• Building a financial model to forecast financial statements
• Using rolling forecasts in adaptive management processes
• Building a financial model to make rolling forecasts

Day 5: Financial models for business valuation

• The need for business valuation
• Approaches to business valuation
• Understanding the shareholder value added (SVA) method
• Building a financial model for business valuation

Training Methodology

Lectures, discussions, exercises, and case studies will be used to reinforce these teaching/learning methods.