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This comprehensive course is designed to sharpen your management skills and focusing on current best practices in finance and accounting. Finance is a core process/function in business that requires executive attention. Accounting is the language of business; understanding and applying this language to your business in general remains the single most valuable competence of management. Prepare yourself by enhancing your personal competence in identifying best practices in finance and in accounting. In this course you will learn how to:

• Manage and motivate people more effectively
• Create and harness the power of high performance teams
• Understand and effectively utilize strategic planning techniques
• Use the Baldrige performance criteria as a standard of excellence and benchmark for your organization
• Focus on real companies and their finance function and accounting processes to show participants which elements have achieved best practices status
• Remove much of the mystique associated with the management of finance and accounting
• Focus on challenging yourself to become the strategic financial leaders of the organization
• Prepare yourself for future responsibilities by examining best practices in these important functions/processes

By the end of this course, delegates will be able to:

• Consider methods for improving management performance
• Gain insights into the successful implementation of teams
• Study the techniques for strategic planning
• Develop negotiation skills
• Analyse the Baldrige Award criteria for excellence
• Examine the application of management best practices
• Identify best practices for the roles of CFO, controller, treasurer, and accountants in the content of, and relationships between, financial statements (income statement, balance sheet, and statement of cash flows)
• Discuss best practices in the use of financial statements to evaluate the financial / strategic performance of an organization
• Utilise best practices in discounted cash flow (DCF) techniques and their application to financial decision-making
• Identify best practices in corporate performance management using key success factors, weak financial signals, and strong financial signals in various industry sectors
• Illustrate how best practices in EVA® (Economic Value Added), SVA (Shareholder Value Added), and RI (Residual Income) can be used to value competing strategies
• Define best practices in the value creation/destruction process in mergers and acquisitions from the market perspective and signals to management from the market
• Clarify best practices in the roles of directors, auditors, and others in their respective roles in corporate governance
• Identify best practices in the various sources of financial and business data that provide insights into business and financial strategies
• Identify best practices in the details of financial control, risk management, and financial reporting from the perspectives of the internationally recognized professional associations
• Enhance personal networks of similarly minded high potential managers

Financial Managers, Senior Accountants, Accounting & Budgeting Personnel, Financial and non-financial professionals who wish to test their high performance and high potential knowledge, skills and attitudes with other similar individuals, Anyone who wishes to reinforce their knowledge of financial functions/processes and who requires a more integrative financial view

People Management

· The importance of sociotechnical management

· Techniques for effective communication

· Motivating for results

· Enhancing your coaching skills

· Empowering employees for improved performance

· Characteristics of a successful manager

Leading Teams

· Obtaining the benefits of teamwork

· Characteristics of ineffective teams

· Characteristics of effective teams

· Managing conflict in a productive manner

· Understanding team member styles

· Creating a virtual team

Strategic Planning

· Analyzing the strategic planning process

· Achieving competitive advantage

· Utilizing dynamic SWOT analysis

· Focusing on vision and mission

· The importance of contingency planning

Negotiating for Results

· Gaining insight into the negotiating process

· Characteristics of an effective negotiator

· Developing negotiating strategies

· Employing persuasive negotiation techniques

· Achieving the benefits of effective negotiating

Operational Excellence

· The Malcolm Baldrige quality award-standard of excellence

· Lessons from the best performing companies

· Benchmarking your operation against the best

· Creating employee commitment

· Managing continuous improvement

· Creating the high performance organization

Getting Started with Best Practices in Finance and Accounting

· The role of financial management

· CFO, Treasurer, and Controller

· The role of functional management in respect to financial management

· The basic financial statements and their articulation

· Evaluating performance and why ROI/ROCE is still a good place to start

· Competitive perspectives related to financial statements

· Best practices in preparing, presenting and populating financial statements

· Identifying key success factors in industry sectors

Best Practices in Early Review and Projections of Strategy via Financial Statements

· Short-term success evaluations process and measures

· Weak signals for future strategic adjustments

· Buy, sell, or hold investments

· Best practices in financial review compared to targets and expectations

· Financial performance measurement systems

· Best practices in finding and using key accounting assumptions

· Compare business system to financial results

Best Practices in Annual Reports, Footnotes, and Corporate Governance

· Best practices in annual reports using IFRS, or other standards

· Role of exchange commissions and social policy

· Best practices in reconciling accounting standards and reporting

· Best practices in examining corporate governance and shareholder value as well as stakeholder value

· Benchmarking external reviews, industry reports and analyst reports

· Best practices in boards of directors and their move to financial literacy

· Benchmarking shareholder value measures

Best Practices in Industry / Financial Analysis and Balancing the Scorecard

· Best practices in asking financial managers to guide the understanding of an industry sector with ratios and other financial statements

· Benchmarking treasury management

· Cash, FOREX, working capital, and CAPEX

· Best practices in controllership

· Planning, control, costing, and profitability

· Benchmarking value creation from the controllership function

· Finding best practices in non-financial inputs to financial statements

· Activity based costing

· Time-based costing

· Competence based costing and financial analysis

· Where financial management fits into the balanced scorecard

Best Practices in Net Present Value Thinking and Next Generation Financial Modelling

· Best practices in NPV as the ultimate decision criterion

· Benchmarking the use of real options as a next generation best practice

· Presenting and communicating to executive audiences the best practices in finance and accounting

· Demonstrating next generation model building

· Challenging the finance function with regards to best practices

· What applications of lessons learned in Mastering Finance and Accounting are applicable to your company and in your markets