OCEANIC Conseil - Formation
FR

Budget preparation and monitoring

Context and rationale

Budget management means planning, over a longer or shorter term, the income and expenditure expected over a period. It rests on three concepts: forecasting, budgeting and budgetary control.

Preparing the budget is a key stage in defining and implementing the company's development priorities. The budget makes it possible to plan and control the performance of managers and, more broadly, of the company. Budgetary control consists of constantly comparing actual results with the forecasts in the budgets in order to find the cause or causes of variances.

This course will enable you to identify and master the stages and methods of a budget procedure, to build, organise and run the budget process, to optimise and validate budgets and finally to monitor the budget for better steering of activities.

Training objectives

  • Knowing the principles of budget construction: from sales forecasts to the cash budget.
  • Applying a methodology to build a budget step by step.
  • Organising and running the budget process.
  • Understanding budgetary control.
  • Monitoring the budget and steering activities.

Training content

Integrating the budget approach: ensuring consistency between long-term strategy and short-term action plans
  • The different horizons of forecast management.
  • The key points of strategic planning.
  • The annual budget, the first year of the operational plan.
Running the budget process
  • The budget procedure: stages, organisation, assumptions.
  • Budget coordination.
  • The link with strategic planning.
  • Self-diagnosis of the budget procedure.
Preparing the basic budgets
  • Sales and marketing budgets.
  • Production and procurement budgets.
  • Investment budgets.
  • Staff cost budgets.
Preparing the cash budget and forecast financial statements (or general budgets)
  • Cash budget
  • Forecast balance sheet
Presenting and defending a budget
  • The people involved: line managers, management controller...
  • Getting a budget approved: identifying the budget issues within the company
  • Preparing figures-based documents: good practices
  • Negotiating action plans: what trade-offs should be made?
Budgetary control: measuring and analysing budget variances
  • Analysing actual results.
  • Defining monitoring tools: steering dashboards.
  • Mastering variance analysis techniques.
  • The cause and effect tree of variances.
Designing dashboards in Excel (practical work)

    Let's discuss your training needs

    Free, no-obligation offer. An adviser will call you back within 48 hours.

    WhatsApp