Budgets, borrowing and resilience
Budgeting, capital finance and financial sustainability.
Around four hours on decisions that reach beyond this year: value for money, budgets and monitoring, capital borrowing, and building financial resilience for the bad year.
- Level
- Focus
- Learning time
- 4 hours
- Where
- Finance for Non Finance Professionals
- Price
- £69
When you step up to a higher level, what you paid in the last 12 months for lower-level courses inside the bigger course comes off its price, in proportion to how much of each is inside it, whichever topic it's from. Courses at the same or a lower level don't give credit against each other. A Focus course or above always costs at least £15. Read the full terms
Certificate of Completion, or Certificate of Completion and Assessment with a short assessment
Overview and Outcomes.
Who It's For
Board members and senior leaders who approve budgets, borrowing and financial plans
Overview
This Focus looks at money decisions that shape an organisation's future. It begins with choosing well: value for money through the three Es and equity, cost benefit analysis, the Green Book five-case model and the long-run Sure Start evidence, then budgeting from incremental and zero-based to Beyond Budgeting and Handelsbanken. It moves to staying on course: forecast outturn, variance analysis, the RAG rating trap and Birmingham City Council's Oracle programme, then payback, net present value, CIPFA's Prudential Code and the Woking and Thurrock cases. It ends with resilience: medium-term financial plans, sensitivity and scenario testing, section 114 and Birmingham's equal pay case, closing with a capstone on Croydon, Nottingham and the Co-operative Bank.
Aims
The aim is to help boards engage with a budget before the vote, ask plain and searching questions of monitoring reports and borrowing proposals, and test their plans against the downside so they are ready when a bad year comes.
In summary, you will be able to:
- Assess whether a business case or budget offers real value for money, probing its assumptions through the five-case model and budget setting stages.
- Diagnose what a budget monitoring report and a capital borrowing proposal mean for future affordability, using variance analysis and the Prudential Code.
- Plan for financial resilience by testing the medium-term financial plan against bad-case scenarios and recognising the warning signs that precede failure.
What you'll develop
Through this Focus course, you will build the ability to:
- Apply economy, efficiency, effectiveness and equity to test whether a proposal offers value for money rather than a low price.
- Recognise common budget games, and plan how your board engages at each of the five stages of budget setting.
- Analyse a variance into price, volume and timing, and decide which adverse or favourable variances deserve board time.
- Judge where a commercial investment or owned company sits on purpose and risk, and set out the governance it needs.
- Distinguish sensitivity analysis from scenario planning, and explain how a board makes a bad-case scenario safe to present.
- Use the six habits of financially confident boards to plan the questions you will raise at your own board.
Built from 3 parts.
4 hours of learning.
- 01Value for money, budgets that workInvestment appraisal and budgeting approachesBitesize2 modules
- 02Keeping the budget honestBudget monitoring, capital and borrowingBitesize2 modules
- 03Built to lastFinancial resilience, with case studiesBitesize2 modules
Keep going.
Part of the Finance for Non Finance Professionals topic, also sold whole as Follow the money.
Go deeper, and pay only the difference
- You are hereFocus, 4 hours, £69
- Next stepExplore, Managing the money, 5 hours 30 minutes, £129. Already own the Focus? You pay £60.
- The whole topicImmerse, Follow the money, 11 hours, £249. Already own the Focus? You pay £180.
When you step up to a higher level, what you paid in the last 12 months for lower-level courses inside the bigger course comes off its price, in proportion to how much of each is inside it, whichever topic it's from. Courses at the same or a lower level don't give credit against each other. A Focus course or above always costs at least £15. Prices per person. Read the full terms