Creating Effective Budgets
Setting an effective budget allows an organisation to plan and control its activities so that it can pursue and achieve its goals. However, there is no one “right” way to undertake the budgeting process. There are several key methods of preparing a budget, each with its own benefits and drawbacks. There are also a variety of internal and external factors that must be considered to ensure that the resulting budget is actually effective as a planning and control tool. Both of these things make the budgeting process tricky to get right!
In this course, we’ll tackle these issues and more, providing you with the foundations to create effective budgets that are suited to the organisation and its needs.
Provides 8 hours of CPD
- The reasons to use budgeting as part of the planning and control process in an organisation
- How to prepare the key types of budgets: incremental, zero-based, activity-based and rolling budgets
- The benefits and drawbacks of each of the budget types above so that you can determine which would be most suitable based on the organisation’s needs
- How to create a flexible budget to overcome the issue of an organisation’s actual output being different to its budget, allowing more insightful variance analysis
- How to prepare a cash budget to ensure that the organisation has sufficient funds for its upcoming operations and investment opportunities
- The behavioural aspects of budgetary control that must be considered to ensure that budgets do, in fact, encourage staff to strive for efficiency
- How responsibility accounting can be used to ensure managers are held accountable for the budgetary areas within their control
- Big data and how it can be used to provide more in-depth and up-to-date information for budgets to be based upon
- How internal controls and stress testing can be used to minimise deviations from the budget to increase its accuracy and effectiveness
- An introduction to an alternative approach to planning and control, beyond budgeting, that overcomes some of the shortcomings of traditional budgeting
This course also provides a series of practice questions that will solidify your knowledge of budgeting. Completing these questions alongside the course will ensure that you take on board everything you need to know in order to help create effective budgets.
Please note that this course shares some topics and material with the course “Effective Performance Management”. Both courses cover flexible budgeting, the behavioural aspects of budgetary control and responsibility accounting.
What’s included in the course?
Videos
- Thoroughly explores the concepts, theories and models for this topic
- The content is professionally explained by our expert tutors alongside a visual presentation
- Come with downloadable audio files so you can listen to the content offline and on the go
Handbooks
- Full coverage of the video content using engaging and easy-to-follow language
- A range of examples to show you how these concepts might apply to real-life situations, e.g. in finance
- A practical exercise for each module based on the subject’s application in a finance team
Practice questions
- A series of questions designed to test your understanding of what you’ve learnt on the course
- Designed to get you to apply what you’ve learned to scenarios and commit the theory to memory
Presentation slides
- The visual presentation from the video can be accessed for note-taking and for browsing alongside the video or audio download
- Can be viewed as still slides or in an interactive format to move around the screen
Purchasing the course
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Astranti CPD Course:
Creating Effective Budgets
£149.00
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