Introduction
Are you stuck in the back office counting the beans, rather than spending your time working in partnership with the senior business team? If you just answered yes to that question then this course is for you.
The traditional role of the accountant as the bean counter is no longer appropriate in the 21st Century business world. Instead you must assume the roles of trusted business advisor and enabler of your company’s strategies and plans. Taking on the craft of growing beans rather than counting them means you need a whole set of skills and tools you were never given to pass your accountancy exams, but are vital to a role as part of senior leadership.
Ultimately as a finance director or CFO you will need to work closely with the COO and the other C-Suite directors. This wide-ranging three-day overview is designed to provide you with a comprehensive view of the latest tools and techniques you can use to give meaningful financial support to the rest of your business’ leadership team. It can help you break through the glass ceiling that stops you being the trusted business advisor to the senior team in your business.
This course answers questions such as:
- How can management accounting information be used to help management craft a successful business strategy?
- How can the finance professional impact sales and marketing strategy?
- How can management accounting information be used to enhance the quality of pricing, investment, process improvement, sourcing, and other critical management decisions?
- How can a group of performance measures be selected and assembled that will direct employees toward the implementation of management’s strategy?
- How can an organization insure that its cost model represents the fundamental economics that underlie its business?
- Why is the ability to predict costs just as important as the ability to assign them?
- What should be management accountants’ objective; accuracy and relevance or precision?
- What are the key component parts of an effective management accounting process?
- What kind of modifications must be made to costs recorded under financial accounting standards to make them more representative of the true, long-term, sustainable economics of the organization?
Management accounting is much more than just costing, budgeting, scheduling, forecasting, or performance measurement practices. It is a process that requires partnering in management decision making, devising planning and performance management systems, and providing expertise in financial reporting and control to assist management in the formulation and implementation of an organization’s strategy. Items from the clutter of popular concepts and tools may have a role in that process, but the overall process is much more than accurate costing and sophisticated scorecards.
Optional two-day activity based costing workshop
Do you know who your most profitable customers are? Do you know the true cost of each of your products? Does your pricing reflect the full cost of serving the customer? What drives cost and profitability in your business?
This information is vital, especially as you build your business and marketing strategy, but rarely available. The problem is that the information from your accounting systems is designed for external reporting and to meet tax requirements. There’s a big difference between accounting information and the true economics of the business. Activity based costing fills this gap.
In the workshop we will build on concepts introduced in the main course and give you practical tools and techniques to:
- Determine the true profitability of each of your customers
- Segment customers and markets
- Understand the true costs of your products and services
- Make better pricing decisions
- Eliminate costly and non-value adding activities
- Effectively challenge your operating costs
The workshop effectively combines this course with our popular three day “Practical approach to activity based costing” to make a single 5-day course.
During this workshop, you will:
- Use the cause-and-effect “lens” of activity-based costing to design a cost model that accurately reflects the fundamental economics that underlie your organisation
- Accumulate a “toolbox” of costing concepts, tools and techniques that will help to incorporate seemingly complex issues into your costing model with a minimum of difficulty
- Incorporate your cost model’s design into an Excel-based predictive cost model that can be used to perform incremental cost analyses, measure the cost of key processes and develop rates that can be used to assign costs to individual jobs, products, services, customers, etc.
- Create Excel-based templates that will use your model’s costing rates to accurately assign costs to your company’s jobs, products, services, customers, markets, etc.
- Practice using your model to support a variety of management decisions
- Learn techniques for gathering your company’s detailed information for populating your model and templates after your return home
Topics covered in the workshop include:
- Designing a cost model that fits your firm
- Material support activities
- Value-adding and other direct activities
- Event and transaction activities
- Customer/market support activities
- Product/service line support activities
- General and administrative activities
- The Excel-based cost model
- Basic structure of the model
- Populating your model with test data
- Using the model to support decisions
- Creating Excel-based job/product costing templates
- Creating Excel-based customer costing templates
- Gathering your company’s data to populate the model
- Estimates vs. precise measurement
- Using the general ledger to model reconciliation worksheet
- Gathering cost driver data