Follow the money

Who It's For

Councillors, trustees and board members across public services and charities

Overview

This full-day programme covers the whole finance topic in four stages. It begins with responsibility and language: the four financial duties, the section 151 officer, Northamptonshire County Council, and the vocabulary of accruals, capital and the accounting equation. Next comes reading: the income statement, balance sheet, reserves and cash flow, accounts across five sectors, and ratios read as trends, with the University of Dundee and Carillion. It then tests the truth of the figures through Tesco and Wirecard, external audit, how costs behave, activity-based costing and value for money. Finally it looks to the future: budgeting and monitoring, borrowing at Woking and Thurrock, financial resilience, and a capstone on Croydon, Nottingham and the Co-operative Bank.

Aims

This programme aims to develop board members who read any set of accounts with confidence, turn figures into plain and kindly put questions, and judge whether budgets, borrowing and plans rest on evidence rather than hope, as good stewards of other people's money.

In summary, you will be able to:

1. 1Explain why stewardship of other people's money is every board member's duty, and read the main financial statements of any public service organisation with confidence.
2. 2Assess the reliability of financial information using ratios, audit findings and practical defences against figures that mislead the board.
3. 3Plan budgets, capital investment and reserves that rest on evidence, testing them against downside scenarios and the lessons of recent financial failures.

What you'll develop

By the end of this Immerse, you will be able to:

1. 1Apply five plain questions to any financial paper, testing income security, true cost, risk, cash timing and assumptions with professional scepticism rather than cynicism.
2. 2Assess whether reserves are too little, too much or about right against risk, and set out what a defensible reserves policy should contain.
3. 3Apply a five-step discipline of define, trend, compare, set limits and ask to turn a ratio pack into board questions.
4. 4Apply five practical board defences, from naming the key judgements to protecting the voices of those who raise concerns.
5. 5Judge which costs belong in a decision, distinguishing marginal from average cost, excluding sunk costs and unchanged overheads, and including opportunity costs.
6. 6Assess your organisation's reserves, contingent liabilities and going concern position, and recognise the warning signs that precede a crisis.