This course is all about demystifying basic business finance and accounts, so that we mortals can at least interact with finance people and have half a chance of knowing what they are saying, and signpost situations when we and they absolutely must use professional accountants.

The material is based on the presenter’s experience from working in businesses varying from SME's and start-ups, to a major oil company, and around 15 years of developing training material for non-financial people. It has been run for the Princes Trust, a Learned Society, several Universities, and as CPD for a Professional Institute, typically receiving average feedback scores over 90%.

You should come on this course if you:

• Are interested in starting a new business or social enterprise, but find the money and the jargon intimidating;
• Would like to understand what the stock market is about;
• Are a researcher worrying about the financial aspects of grant applications;
• Have just been promoted (good news!), but then immediately told by the boss 'now prepare a budget' (bad news...).

At the end of the day you will be able to:

• Understand what profit/loss statements and balance sheets are and how they are constructed;
• Prepare an operational cash budget using an Excel template;
• Understand the discussions in an episode of ‘dragon’s den’;
• Tell how quickly a company pays its creditors and gets paid by its debtors;
• Understand the difference between capital and revenue items;
• Understand the difference between overheads and direct costs;
• Understand the difference between full and marginal costing;
• Fill out a VAT form;
• Know the meaning of accruals, depreciation, creditors, reserves, and a whole lot of other accounting terms.

You will take away

• A hard copy workbook featuring all the slides, explanatory text, exercises, examples and references for further reading;
• Electronic copies of the spreadsheet exercises including the Excel budget template mentioned above.'

Agenda:

09:00 Introduction & Workshop Abjectives

• Finance for non-financial people
• Financial Terminology
• 'Dragon's Den' Video
• Some key accounting concepts
• Profit/Loss exercise
• Mr Brown Catering 1 (exercise)
• Are profits the same as cash?
• Overheads and breakeven

11:00 Break

11.30 How Accountants Do Bookkeeping

• Mr Brown Catering 2 (exercise)
• The Balance Sheet and what it tells us
• What do the financial pages in the newspaper tell us?

12:30 Lunch

13:30 Using Company Accounts

• Debtor days and creditor days
• A good company and a 'not so good' one…

14:30 Break

15:00 Financial Proposals

• Reading Budgets
• Financial planning & budgeting
• Preparing revenue budgets (exercise)
• Revenue vs capital budgets

16.00 Tax

• Corporation tax
• The basics of VAT for Managers

16:15 Workshop Summary

• 'Dragons' Den Review'
• Checking our jargon (exercise)
• Workshop evaluation