Mastering Financial Spreadsheets: Financial Planning & Analysis (Part 1) (ICAS)

Overview

Take your financial spreadsheets to the next level and discover how to plan, analyse and output powerful business insights.

This 2-part series concentrates on future-focused activities and how a Financial Analyst can leverage tools in the modern world to help influence the direction of a business.

This course uses Microsoft Excel for the live exercises

• Discovering trends and patterns in business data to advise the Board on insights
• Working with seasonal data and producing forecasts
• Build a 4-year financial projection plan with a depreciation schedule
• Perform a variety of ratio analysis (Profit Margin / Debt-to-Equity / Competitor Comparison) to analyse the financial health of a business
• Conduct probability analysis (inc. Monte Carlo simulation) to determine viability of taking on a project
• Analyse risk return profiles (inc. bonus financial functions)

Who is this for?

This one day course is for anyone wanting to take their skills and knowledge of finance tasks in Excel to the next level.This course will be of interest to Finance Professionals and Investment Managers, but the course will particularly benefit Financial Analysts, or those who are wanting to gain stronger skills in financial planning and analysis.

What will you learn?

• Uncover powerful techniques in Excel to influence the future direction of the business
• Discover easy financial modelling skills to produce a 4-year projection plan (inc. formulate and connect a depreciation schedule)
• Confidently analyse the financial health of a business with the comprehensive guide to ratio analysis
• Experience the power of probability analysis (run a large-scale Monte Carlo simulation)
• Learn how to select the best investments for a business by analysing the risk return profile

Please read the following guidance carefully, which applies only if you are attending this course online:

• In addition to the Online Classroom, you will need to have your own version of Excel open to complete the exercises
• It does prove to be challenging to follow-on with the exercises using only 1 screen as you will need to be regularly switching between open windows. We recommend to either:
  • Extend from a computer to a 2nd screen - please refer to this link for guidance on how to correctly setup a second monitor https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4340331/windows-10-set-up-dual-monitors or
  • Use 2 computers, or
  • Use a tablet for the online classroom and a computer for the Excel
• Please note that our courses are based on Excel for Windows and it is recommended that you are using at least Excel 2010 or a later version. MAC users are welcome but please note that there may be some tools and functionality that will differ from what is being presented. The presenter will accommodate for MAC versions on the course.