The company accounts are finished, so what's next? The financial dashboard and its ratios are an essential tool for every manager to gain insight into the company and steer it in the right direction.    

Financial dashboards track ratio’s and KPIs and other data points in one visual, central place. They give you an in-depth and high-level view of the financial status of your company and the market place you are operating in. 

This one-day training course focuses on the major financial/accounting ratios and their application in business and corporate decision making.  They also reveal the relationships that exist between various items of information within accounts. We learn how to structure them and discover the importance in establishing a trend analysis of key performance indicators.

The dashboard and the ratios help executives and users of company accounts to get behind the figures on the face of a balance sheet, profit and loss account and cash flow statement and assess more precisely how a business is performing compared with previous years, in comparison to previous forecasts and to competitors.   

The topics covered are:

• What is and why use a financial dashboard? 
• A quick revision on the key financial statements, the balance sheet, income and cash flow statement 
• The nature of ratio analysis
• The profitability ratio’s
• The liquidity and solvency ratio's
• The operating efficiency
• The investor ratios
• The overall performance review
• How to use a financial dashboard as a management steering tool. 

Recommended background

This course is applicable to anyone in need to assess their own organisational performance or evaluate an external organisation. Basic knowledge of financial statements namely the balance sheet, income statement and cash flow statement is assumed by the participants. 

What you will learn

• You will learn to construct a financial dashboard and use several ratio-analysis instruments to assess financial performance so that the organisation can then design and implement initiatives for increased productivity and profitability.
• You will understand through practical examples how financial analysis assists managing cash flow, liquidity and the financial structure. 
• You will develop the ability to forecast into the future and gain an understanding of how all these pieces of the puzzle fit together.

Course format

This course will be taught using a combination of formal instructions, combined with practical and interactive exercises and case studies used to reinforce the concepts taught in each section of the course.

Practice-based learning and critical engagement is a key theme through all our courses allowing delegates to acquire the needed skills and techniques to be applied as soon as they are learned and developed.

*** Congratulations! Very well done. Nothing more to add.

*** I really appreciated the empathy and skills of the lecturer. Also, the size of the group (7 persons) was perfect to have the necessary interactivity throughout the course.

*** I strongly recommended this training to my colleagues as I found it very useful.

*** I think this was one of the best course I've ever attended. The trainer,  was extremely pedagogic and the structure of the course was very well planned with just the right mixture of theory versus practical examples and exercises.

*** It was a very enjoyable course. The group was small which made it easier to be 100% involved.  The exercises and case study were absolutely great and necessary to put the theory in practice. A very knowledgeable