Financial Forecasting: Tools and Techniques

One of the most difficult challenges professionals face in making decisions is, probably, estimating and projecting future events. This difficulty is usually dealt with, unfortunately, by excessive reliance on professional judgement and educated guesses. Though judgement and experience play a significant role in building proper forecasting, there are certain tools and techniques that can help professionals in this daunting task. This course focuses on these tools and puts them into practice utilizing MS Excel.

The course is a hands-on workshop that applies the forecasting techniques utilizing MS Excel through the use of different exercises and case studies.

By the end of the course, participants will be able to:

• Apply different forecasting techniques that will help in making financial and business decisions
• Utilize Microsoft Excel to build forecasting models effectively
• Explain the different macro and micro assumptions affecting financial and business forecasts
• Build models for forecasting income statements, balance sheets and cash flow statements and their components
• Differentiate between various forecasting models and approaches and assist senior management in understanding their impact

Financial controllers, analysts, finance and accounting managers, supervisors, and finance professionals who need to create, interpret and maintain forecasts in their organizations.

• Forecasting
• Time series analysis
• Regression analysis
• Modeling financial statements
• Applying Excel functions and tools

This is a hands-on training course using laptops which will be made available by Arab. For courses outside the UAE, participants are required to bring their own laptops with a fully functional version of Excel 2010/2013.