Belt and road 10 course pack (select 10 courses from the full catalogue)

There is nothing difficult or mystical about Activity Based Costing - on the contrary, it is based on simple, common sense concepts and practical methods. It seeks to drive much greater cost understanding across all of an organisation’s operations, enabling management to take smarter decisions driving real business benefits through to the bottom line. Yet many who tried lost focus, introducing impractical complexity along with time and cost, into implementations - making them largely unworkable and unsustainable. This course gets back to the basics of ABC principles and demonstrates how it can be practically adopted with a minimum of pain and fuss.

When managing a business, leaders follow varying agendas and objectives in making decisions. The finance function is often seen as the key steward and guardian of financial value for the investors and will continue to drive the delivery of that value from throughout the business.

This course will introduce you to a clear understanding of the measurement of financial value; how financial value is generated from strategic initiatives, pricing spend management; and how the finance team can contribute to building value.

This course provides a concise introduction to the preparation of financial statements under IFRS Standards. It considers the sources of IFRS Standards, the presentation of financial statements, and some of the key accounting treatments.

This course reviews the basic structure of an investment bank. It focuses on the basic activities of the different functional areas including sales and trading, corporate finance, compliance etc

Having developed a strategy with accounting input, implemented the strategy in an effective and motivational way it is important to assess whether the key elements of your Strategy have actually been successful. In this module we are going to consider some benchmarks and definitions that should help you fashion an appropriate and cost effective set of measures to measure your success.

Arguably, the problem in most companies with performance measurement isn’t that we don’t have enough - quite the opposite. - It’s that we have too much and that what we have is unfocused lacks a real connection to strategy, lacks coherence down and across the organisation and fails to drive the behaviours and results we seek. The Balance Scorecard is a performance management framework that seeks to address these shortcomings.

Intangible assets such as brands that are organically developed are not recognised on the balance sheet or statement of financial position. However, intangible assets - including brands - that are acquired have to be valued and recognised. This course looks at the techniques involved in the valuation of intangible assets - particularly brands - and how financial reporting has been evolving to deal with such assets and the challenges arising.

When you're running a business, it's easy to focus on day-to-day problems and forget the bigger picture. However, successful businesses invest time to create and manage budgets, prepare and review business plans and regularly monitor finance and performance. Structured planning can make all the difference to the growth of a business. It enables business owners to concentrate resources on improving profits, reducing costs and increasing returns on investment.

This course will help you understand the basics of budgeting and will give you an appreciation of the process used and practical aspects of preparation

Business has been slowly pulling away from the 2008 global financial crisis. As opportunities for growth increase, leaders must decide how best to invest. Initiatives to build and sustain growth include entering new geographic markets, investment in innovation and product development, enhanced branding. The finance function has an important role to play in leading growth initiatives through to benefit delivery.

This course will help you understand the importance of good communication. Good communication allows you to present your ideas and thought in a way which is engaging and persuasive. It will help you improve your ability to question, listen, form a rapport, coach and mentor and cover what you can do to feel more confident when dealing with conflict. This course is a must have for anyone in the workplace and will provide even the best communicators with useful hints and tip to help you improve your communication skills even further.

Hasn’t everything been said about SWOT?

Well, actually, no. In this module we will introduce you to the Constructive SWOT which is a much more powerful and effective way to use this model. Using the Constructive SWOT analysis will help you examine, in real depth and with unprecedented rigour, how to build a solid and robust business strategy at corporate, division, SBU or even at team level. The model is in fact generic, so you can use it anywhere you need to think through the pros and cons of a proposed business decision.

Change is inevitable. Disruptive technologies, globalisation, ever-increasing competition and uncertainties in the political and economic contexts all result in change upon change to the organisations in which we work.

It is quite natural to fear change and want to cling on to the security of the status quo - change can be difficult and stressful and it can cause us a lot of anxiety. But it doesn’t need to be that way. Change can also bring opportunities of which we can take advantage: progress and growth on individual, organisational and societal levels all come from change.

This course looks at positive responses to change so that the individual and the organisation can prosper through change and use it to their advantage.

Skillful delegation is one of the most important management skills and yet it is notoriously difficult for managers to crack. When done well, the benefits are huge for the manager, the employee delegated to and for the organisation as a whole.

It enables staff to learn and grow, frees up the manager’s time to enable them to take on new responsibilities and finds the most efficient and cost-effective use of the organisation’s resources.

Risk management has been talked about for many years but it has a history of inconsistent and misunderstood definitions. This has led to the development of new frameworks to allow all types of organisation to understand and better manage their risk environments.

The term “dashboard” is a buzzword in the world of Excel and in businesses today. A dashboard report is a management tool that measures and presents critical data on the key business performance areas in a summarised manner much like a car dashboard, so management can quickly respond with appropriate decisions.

Dashboards enable the reader to make sense of the raw numbers by presenting them in visually rich charts and tables and give valuable insights into the key performance indicators of the business.

The course covers an introduction into some of the lesser known charting techniques along with advanced tools and functions of Excel.

Financial modelling is becoming an increasingly important skill in an economic environment characterised by ever more uncertainty. The ability to use Excel to predict what the financial performance and position of a business or venture might look like in the future, depending on particular assumptions and estimates.

It is easy to build a poor financial model. It is difficult to build a high quality financial model which will satisfy the needs of the user. In order to build the latter rather than the former there are a number of Golden Rules (Dos and Don’ts) that must be adhered to. This course explains what those rules are.

Financial modelling is becoming an increasingly important skill in an economic environment characterised by ever more uncertainty. The ability to use Excel to predict what the financial performance and position of a business or venture might look like in the future, depending on particular assumptions and estimates.

Effective use of Fn 4 $$s for absolute cell referencing is an essential skill required to build a dynamic and flexible financial model. High quality formatting is also important, and cell styles provide an ideal way to achieve this.

Financial modelling is becoming an increasingly important skill in an economic environment characterised by ever more uncertainty: the ability to use Excel to predict what the financial performance and position of a business or venture might look like in the future, depending on particular assumptions and estimates.

Effective use of logical statements is an essential skill required to build a dynamic and flexible financial model. The ability to lookup particular data items is also important and this course covers a number of different ways of doing this.

The course covers an insight into powerful and effective trending techniques for forecasting and budgeting and includes industry-standard Excel models which can be applied with any business data easily.

All of us will at times feel reluctant to deliver bad news or to broach sensitive or contentious issues with others. Yet whether in our personal or professional lives we will, in our lifetimes, need to hold many such conversations. Being able to hold them with fairness and equanimity is an invaluable and much-admired skill. Our course aims to provide you with the tools to approach such conversations with greater confidence and to be able to plan and conduct them in such a way that relationships are preserved and where possible a mutually acceptable way forward found.

The following presentation looks at IAS 1, Presentation. This is a basic standard containing important questions about the main financial statements required for reporting under International Financial Reporting Standards.

This course is designed to refresh knowledge and bring you up-to-date with the latest developments of IAS 12 and is therefore suitable for delegates with some existing knowledge of either IFRS or UK GAAP. IAS 12 covers the accounting treatment of current tax, under and over provisions and deferred tax. Although IAS 12 has been in issue for a number of years, this is quite often an area of significant difference for those that are new to IFRS reporting.

During this course we will look at all aspects of employee benefits covered within IAS 19 including post employment benefits such as pensions, looking at both the current IAS 19 and the recent amendments to IAS 19, short term benefits such as holiday accruals, termination benefits where we will look at things like redundancy payments and all of the long term benefits generally paid post employment.

The following presentation looks at IAS 38, Intangible Assets. It defines what intangible assets are and how to set up the accounting treatment for these intangible assets.

This course on IAS 7 - statements of cash flows, deals with the fourth primary financial statement an entity is required to present under IFRS. This is the only statement that is not covered in IAS 1. Unlike many national accounting rules IAS 7 requires all entities to present a cash flow statement as an integral part of the financial statements. This course will take you through the contents of IAS 7 to help enable you to present cash flow statements.

The following presentation looks at IAS 8: Accounting Policies, Changes in Accounting. This standard can be seen as an extension of IAS 1 and the presentation will cover topic areas such as the selection of accounting policies, changes in accounting policies, changes in accounting estimates and correction of error.

This online course will cover accounting for share-based payments under International Financial Reporting Standards.

The following presentation looks at IFRS 1, First-Time Adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards. This unique standard is generally required once in an entity’s life, when it makes the transition from some national accounting system to IFRS.

Revenue recognition is a something that effects as all and in 2018 it is changing. There will be far more explicit consideration of components in a bundled package together with the associated timing and amount of revenue allocated to each component. The new standard may create change for an organisation not just in turns of revenue but also in terms of legal contracts, IT systems and interaction between the sales function and accounting function. This courses provides an overview of the new revenue framework of IFRS 15 and considers the practical aspects of its implementation.

IFRS 16 Leases radically changed the accounting for lease contracts by requiring lessees to recognise an asset and a liability for nearly all leases. This course aims to enable delegates to understand and apply the accounting and presentation requirements of IFRS 16 Leases.

It first considers the identification of lease arrangements, and then considers in detail, with examples, the detailed model set out for lessees.

IFRS 8 is the International Financial Reporting Standard that requires companies to give disclosures about their operating segments. The standard replaces IAS14, segmental reporting and applies to reporting periods commencing on or after the first of January 2009.

This course will benefit those who have some experience of international standards, either from their professional exams or in the workplace, and who are in need of a refresher on group accounting. Following the recent issues of the new group accounting standards IFRS 10 Consolidated financial statements, IFRS 11 Joint arrangements and the update to IFRS 3 Business combinations, there have been some significant changes to how we account for entities within the group.

The two key players in a significant amount of financial reporting development are undoubtedly the IASB and the FASB. The course provides a comparison of the two reporting frameworks in terms of general reporting requirements and specific accounting treatments. This course will therefore provide a useful context with which to understand current development and create an awareness of the financial reporting challenges for groups with component reporting under each of the frameworks.

Empirical evidence suggests that for many organisations strategies often fail to achieve the desired outcomes that an organisation seeks. Much of this can be attributed to the implementation of strategic initiatives.

Have you ever looked at a set of accounts and not known where to start? Accounts can seem daunting and almost appear in a foreign language! This module looks at accounts in their simplest form and aims to demystify the language of accounts. You will learn about the basics of the accounts and the elements that make up the accounts, along with the basic principles that underpin every set of accounts

"Have you ever been asked to present a business plan and not known where to start? Irrespective of your job role, business cases are a common feature of every day working life

 This course is for those who want to understand what a business plan is, and what it is used for. During this course you will look at the essential components of a credible business plan."

Often in our roles as accountants we can be experts in a tiny part of the overall process. We might be brilliant at credit control or payroll or producing the monthly pie charts. But where does all the information go and why does it look the way it does when the public eventually see it? This course is a gentle introduction into the world of financial accounts. In it we’ll look at how a set of accounts is constructed, who might read it and what they might get out of it. You will see that it is so much more than a P&L and Balance Sheet.

This course is for those who have a basic understanding of accounts but want to take a deeper dive and look at the primary financial statements in more detail. In this module you will look at the content and structure of the Profit & Loss account, the Balance Sheet and the Cashflow statement and the relationships between the financial statements. You will also look at other components of a published set of financial statements, including the Directors Report, Corporate Governance and Directors Remuneration.

In this course we review the basic functions of an investment bank and Mergers and Acquisitions or M&A practitioners within an Investment Banking Division (IBD).

With treasury management becoming a key strategic function within an organisation following the financial crisis, this course provides a basic grounding in the concepts and products used in treasury management within banks, companies and financial institutions.

When thinking about risk and return and how the two interact with each other. NPV (net present value) by itself simply focuses on return and a lot of organisations make the mistake of simply using return as a basis on which to make their decisions. Now if you ask any investor how they make their decisions, they will tell you that risk is just as important to consider alongside return. And therefore we need to balance risk and return in making investment decisions and this is where sensitivity analysis assists with those decisions.

In this course, we aim to give you an understanding of a variety of investment appraisal techniques. In particular, we are going to focus on discounted cash flow techniques, namely NPV or net present value. At the end of the course, you should have an idea how companies or even individuals decide whether or not to proceed with a capital purchase or investment project.

During this course we’ll have a brief look at theory of Leadership. There are many books that are being written and we’ve distilled some of those key theory papers while bringing it up to date and talk about some of the current trends to look at a team. We’ll look at How to lead a team successfully? How to put a team together successfully? How to make sure your team works and consider the individuals within that team or entity that you are managing on an individual basis? Also to have a look at you as an individual and what you bring to the role of leadership?

There is a growing trend in firms to adopt the use of lean tools to streamline and enhance productivity and effectiveness of organisations.

Whilst their initial application was focused on manufacturing and production operations there is increasing use and application of the tools in other functional areas such as finance.

There is currently a heightened sense of uncertainty and change for business and for finance functions. CIMA, other professional institutes, businesses, professional firms, consultancies and academics are responding with new thinking and this short module will provide a bite sized take away from their latest guidance and research.

It is fair to say that not all companies have a blessed life from their inception to their stock market floatation. The road to success is paved with a wide range of corporate pot holes. The small company growing too fast. The unsuccessful acquisition. Public sector privatisation. Technological obsolescence. So many reasons for firms to become sub-optimal. In the current economic climate where the rate of technological change is so fast it is easy to get lost on day to day production and find yourself exposed to strategic risk. This course is intended to provide thinking space for those that want to make sure their company does not get into difficulty. And for those who find themselves in charge of one that is!

Business creates value by building strategic competitive advantage. In the modern knowledge based economy, investment in intangibles such as brands and innovation, builds and protects competitive advantage.

Reporting practice tends to better recognise tangible capital expenditure and is best suited to a manufacturing economy. Financial statements are ill suited to judge the health and value of a company in a more knowledge based economy.

This course will show how the finance function can change the fixation with financial statements and introduce robust financial management tools to help businesses to nurture intangible investments: building value and combatting risk.

Negotiation is at the heart of many professional and business interactions whether with clients, internal or external, suppliers, colleagues or indeed, any stakeholder. The key to profitable and sustainable business relationships is the ability to achieve win-win solutions that satisfy all parties at the table.

In the new economic situation, the need to get the best deal possible is more pressing than ever. More than ever, the culture of negotiation needs to spread and deepen throughout the organisation, leading to a constant reduction in costs and improvement in efficiency.

Most organisations accept without question the principle that costs should be kept as low as possible provided they don’t put key corporate objectives at risk. In practice, organisations often face strong pressure to increase resources to meet objectives such as better customer service and product quality. Reducing costs is often problematic because it not clear exactly what is being done, and the value of this work to the organisation, in the areas you seek savings. This course examines six ways of overcoming these problems: improving the ability of spending areas to contribute to key corporate objectives and customer needs, while reducing their costs significantly.

In a world that has been described as VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous)…a world where it’s impossible to tell news from fake…where countries are becoming insular and globalisation seems to be a thing of the past. The only thing that is certain is that nothing is certain. It means that understanding the risks that a business is exposed to is crucial and having a formal way of identifying and managing risk essential.

This course looks at the tools and techniques for identifying and managing risks; the impact of risk appetite on the organisation and its staff and the importance of considering opportunities in conjunction with risks.

Businesses face constant pressure to achieve improved performance and are facing increasing scrutiny on how that performance is being delivered. Finance are traditionally seen as the masters of rigorous measurement to enable financial performance and we have the capability to apply that across the whole organisation.

We can lose sight of measuring what really matters: restricted in our thinking by financial reporting measures and not really identifying the drivers of past or future performance.

This course will highlight which financial measures really matter and then show how to identify business driver measures including those in a balanced scorecard style approach and those from a sustainability and integrated thinking approach. You will pick up many tips on choosing and designing the right business metrics.

A key driver of the success of any business is the appropriate setting of the price of its products and services. Finance has an important role to play in driving revenue through pricing management but has a tendency to focus time on costing.

Pricing for finance managers often concentrates on product pricing and costs. This course will move through and beyond the expected approach to emphasise service provision pricing and alternative ways to price services.

This course will provide you with an introduction to traditional and alternative determinants of price; and help you to consider their applicability to your own business and the role finance function can play in supporting pricing decision making.

Pricing is one of the most difficult decisions that a manager can make. Many see it as complicated, risky and even terrifying. The reality is rather different. As long as you understand a few of the ground rules, you will not go too far wrong in your pricing efforts. One of the rather daunting issues is that there are as many opinions about how to set price as there are managers offering them. Some of the advice is sound, solid and pragmatic. Other suggestions are wrongly founded, based on half understood premises or just plain stupid. We review no fewer than 18 such myths, offer rational responses to them and explain the theory behind the answers. This will enable you to recognise an “urban legend” when you hear one, and how to deal with it confidently and unambiguously.

Leading business 'guru' Deming stated that "85% of the reasons for failure to meet customer expectations are related to deficiencies in systems and processes…rather than the employee. The role of management is to change the process rather than badgering individuals to do better". In this course we look at how to better manage, improve and design processes to address Deming's concern. We cover what processes are and how they operate in a business, how to recognise the state of maturity of process management in your business, and to measure and report the performance and state of each key process. We then go on to consider the methods for improving and designing processes for optimum performance, before finally looking at the drivers of successfully deploying Process Excellence.

Did you know that essentially the key reason for business failure is running out of cash; if a business no longer has cash, it doesn’t matter what else is going on, the business can’t and won’t survive. Having adequate cash flow is essential to keep a business running. When cash runs out, the company runs the risk of not being able to meet current obligations such as payroll, suppliers and loan repayments.

Yet despite this the majority of failed businesses mislead themselves that profitability is the key indicator of success and take their eye off cash flow

During this course you’ll look at techniques to make sure that you identify the right project for your organisation. Secondly looking at understanding some of the project dynamics making sure the governor's structure is right and the project structure's right ensuring that you've got the right skills in place to be able to complete the project successfully.In addition we’ll cover the key elements of stakeholder engagement, who to talk to, when to talk to, and the sorts of people you may need to engage with, and how to engage with them, as well. We'll have a look at a couple of the methodologies that are currently out there, those that are very structured and quite bureaucratic, to those that are much more free flowing. Finally the importance of going back and reviewing the project and making sure you learn the lessons from whatever project you've undertaken.

Finance is one of the key backbones of any Business and is absolutely critical to its success, often determining its survival and stability. This course provides participants with a firm grounding in the wide array of financing options for a business and the key considerations in choosing the most optimal financing structure for a firm. From analysing market factors and costs to the industry structure and business model, participants are actively engaged in decision making to select the right financing mix for their businesses.

The principal financial services regulators, the Prudential Regulation Authority and the Financial Conduct Authority, require senior management of authorised firms to be aware of what the regulators expect of them and to be able to provide evidence of meeting regulatory requirements, were one or both of the regulators to visit the firm. This course covers key aspects of senior management responsibilities based on the regulators’ handbooks and public statements made. The material has been aligned with what is generally perceived to be current best practice.

Over the past 40 years there has been a progressive and huge divergence between company balance sheet value and value expressed by shareholders represented by share price and market capitalisation. Furthermore, the statistical correlation between accounting based measures of performance over a 1 to 3 year time horizon and corporate share value is poor. This course looks at the real driving forces behind share values in today’s world.

Accountants and other managers wanting to know how to use both halves of their brain to get more from it, think both logically and strategically, and keep one step ahead of colleagues.

This course will provide you with an understanding of the demand debtor side of working capital. We will also look at why the new format is fit for purpose, and the new and challenging cash environment that many organisations are now facing.

This course primarily covers IAS 16 Property, Plant & Equipment and IAS 40 Investment Properties. It also considers elements of the standards on fair values, impairments, borrowing costs and assets held for sale where relevant.

A new world of cryptocurrency is seeing exponential growth causing a turn in the economy as well as presenting new challenges in the way we do business. While there are around 1600 types of cryptocurrencies available over the internet, it is Bitcoin that has experienced the most fierce value fluctuation of all.

Meanwhile, an accidental discovery has led to much hype around the formations of a decentralised digital ledger, a new and exciting technology that we now call Blockchain.

This has sparked a global debate as to whether this new way of recording transactions could be the solution we have been searching for, in bridging the gap with data protection, digital security and authentication. Many organisations and research facilities already have a taste for the types of answers to digital problems that this new technology could bring.

As the world changes and finance becomes an ever increasing priority for most organsations, there is a recognised need for the role of the finance professional to change. No longer can the finance professional sit behind a spreadsheet or spend hours simply playing with a chart of accounts. There is now a need, and in a lot of cases a pull from the business, for a finance professional to play a greater part in the strategic decision making and planning within a business. This has created the developing role of the Finance Business Partner.

This course explains what that role looks like and briefly considers how the finance professional might get more involved in ensuring the strategy of an organisation gets implemented.

As accountants increasingly break away from the stereotypical view of them as “grey people in grey suits” it is ever more important too ensure that today’s accountant integrates into the business making them an invaluable part of the Strategy development process.

If ever there was a course title that was a hostage to fortune… This course has developed from 10 years interaction with accountants from a wide range of companies and industries each with an incredible range of size and complexity. The six “mistakes” reviewed on the course reflect those gripes and issues that came up repeatedly regardless of the organisation. This course will offer challenges and a range of solutions if you find that these mistakes relate to you or your finance function.

Do you hear the word ‘budget’ and groan in dismay????? Do you dread the budget cycle? If the answer is yes to either of these questions then this is a module for you. Wherever you work and whatever your role, you have an impact on and are impacted by budgets. In this module you will learn about the different types of budget and the different ways to budget for example the fixed and flexible approach to budgeting.

We seem to be getting busier and busier with us being asked to do more and more, in less and less time. This practical course will demonstrate how to work more effectively and efficiently so that we can get more work done in less time. Not only will it improve your productivity but will also help you to achieve a less stressful and more enjoyable way of operating, both within the organisation and outside it.

This course provides an introduction to some of the key issues concerning contract formation, including discussion of the use of Heads of Terms etc, together with an overview of how contracts are structured and a summary of the types of contract terms.

Building on the knowledge acquired in the first webinar in this series, this course provides an introduction to some of the key terms that will be found in most commercial contracts and sets out some of the key issues to be borne in mind when reviewing such clauses.

Do you struggle to understand the different type of costs for example the difference between fixed and variable costs, semi variable and variable costs? This module looks at costs in their simplest form and aims to demystify the language of costs and costing. You will learn about the different types of costs and cost behaviour, the uses and principles of standard costing and the principles of break-even analysis.

In today’s economic climate it is ever more important that organisations are effective in allocating resources. Therefore there is an increasing tendency for organisations to require well thought through business cases for projects. These business cases need to be approached in a disciplined manner and address all the questions that those being asked for approval need answering. This course takes a generic approach to business case formulation that can be applied in any organisation.

Finance functions face many pressures and challenges to enable continued improvement in business performance. We are continually hunting for more sources of profitability, cash and intangible financial value.

In the march for growth and profitability we can sometimes overlook working capital management despite the risk of failure when a business no longer has the cash or financing to pay its bills.

Cash is king and working capital management can unlock cash from day to day operations. Good working capital management can yield a range of great benefits and help minimize risks and lost opportunities.

This course will clarify the role of working capital and signpost you to techniques to help you and your business colleagues optimize it for the benefit of your organisation’s performance.