Executive Programme in Financial Analysis with AI

• Understanding the language of business and finance
• Accounting principles relevant to financial analysis
• Understanding the Income Statement
• Understanding the Balance Sheet
• Understanding the Cash Flow Statement
• Linkages between the three financial statements
• Revenue recognition and expense analysis
• Capital expenditure versus operating expenditure
• Depreciation and amortisation
• Working capital fundamentals

• Understanding annual reports
• Management Discussion & Analysis
• Notes to accounts and disclosures
• Understanding different business models through financial statements

• Decode the Annual Report of a Listed Company
• Identify key business drivers, financial trends and areas requiring further investigation

• Framework for financial statement analysis
• Horizontal analysis
• Vertical/Common-size analysis
• Trend analysis
• Benchmarking against competitors

• Profitability analysis
• Liquidity analysis
• Solvency analysis
• Efficiency and activity analysis
• Return on Assets
• Return on Equity
• Return on Capital Employed
• DuPont Analysis
• EBITDA and operating performance
• Cash conversion cycle
• Free Cash Flow

• Earnings quality
• Cash flow versus accounting profit
• Identifying financial strengths and weaknesses
• Detecting financial warning signals
• Analysing business performance across industries

• Compare two companies within an industry and recommend which business demonstrates superior financial quality

• Role of financial analysis in managerial decision-making
• Cost concepts for business decisions
• Fixed and variable costs
• Contribution margin
• Break-even analysis
• Cost-Volume-Profit analysis
• Operating leverage

• Product profitability
• Customer profitability
• Segment profitability
• Pricing decisions
• Make-versus-buy decisions
• Relevant costing

• Cost optimisation
• Margin improvement
• Working capital management
• Cash and liquidity management
• Unit economics for new-age businesses

• Improve the profitability of a business using cost, pricing and margin analysis

• Role of Financial Planning & Analysis
• Strategic planning versus financial planning
• Building financial budgets

• Revenue forecasting
• Expense forecasting
• Profit forecasting
• Cash flow forecasting
• Working capital forecasting
• Driver-based forecasting
• Rolling forecasts

• Budget versus Actual analysis
• Variance analysis
• Price-Volume-Mix analysis
• KPI design and monitoring
• Business performance dashboards
• Management reporting
• Monthly Business Review

• Translating numbers into management actions
• Prepare a management performance review identifying why actual business performance differs from budget and recommending corrective actions

• Principles of professional financial modelling
• Structuring a financial model
• Identifying key business drivers
• Developing model assumptions
• Revenue modelling
• Cost modelling
• Profitability modelling

• Working capital schedules
• Capital expenditure schedules
• Linking financial statements
• Building financial projections

• Base Case / Upside / Downside scenarios
• What-if analysis
• Sensitivity analysis
• Stress testing
• Break-even scenarios
• Model validation
• Translating modelling outputs into business decisions

• Develop a financial forecast model with Base, Optimistic and Downside business scenarios

• Time Value of Money
• Risk and return
• Cost of capital
• Understanding WACC
• Capital budgeting
• NPV
• IRR
• Payback period
• Evaluating business investments

• Introduction to business valuation
• Enterprise Value versus Equity Value
• Discounted Cash Flow valuation
• Free Cash Flow
• Terminal Value

• Comparable Company Analysis
• Understanding valuation multiples
• EV/EBITDA
• P/E
• EV/Sales
• Valuation sensitivity analysis
• Linking company performance to valuation

• Perform a basic valuation of a listed business using DCF and market multiples

• Understanding financial risk
• Business versus financial risk
• Liquidity risk
• Credit risk
• Market risk
• Interest-rate and currency risks
• Financial leverage

• Quality of earnings
• Aggressive accounting indicators
• Cash flow warning signs
• Related-party transactions

• Corporate governance
• Ethical financial analysis
• ESG and sustainability considerations in financial decision-making

• Analyse a corporate financial failure and identify warning signals that could have been detected earlier from financial information

• Understanding Generative AI and LLMs for finance professionals
• Prompting techniques for financial analysis
• AI-assisted annual report analysis
• Analysing financial statements using AI
• Extracting information from annual reports and filings
• AI-assisted ratio analysis
• Automated competitor benchmarking

• AI for variance analysis
• AI-assisted budgeting and forecasting
• Generating scenarios using AI
• AI-assisted valuation analysis
• Analysing management commentary and earnings calls
• AI for financial research

• AI-assisted management reporting
• Creating executive summaries from financial information
• AI-powered financial dashboards and insight generation
• Automating repetitive finance workflows

• Validating AI-generated financial outputs
• Data confidentiality and security
• Hallucinations and model risks
• Responsible AI for financial decision-making
• Use Generative AI to transform raw company financial information into:
  • Financial performance analysis
  • Competitor comparison
  • Risk assessment
  • Management summary
  • Forward-looking recommendation

• Financial analysis using Excel
• Lookup and analysis functions
• Pivot Tables
• Financial templates
• Scenario Manager
• Goal Seek
• Sensitivity tables
• Building management-ready financial analysis

Participants build a financial model using actual company data covering:

• Revenue projections
• Costs and margins
• P&L forecasting
• Working capital
• Cash flow
• Scenario analysis
• Management insights

• Designing CFO dashboards
• Revenue and profitability dashboards
• Budget-versus-Actual dashboards
• KPI tracking
• Variance visualisation
• Management reporting
• Turning financial data into business narratives

Hands-on workflows for:

• Annual report analysis
• Competitor analysis
• Variance analysis
• Financial research
• Forecasting support
• Management reporting
• Creating board/CXO summaries
• Finance productivity automation

A senior finance practitioner discusses:

• How CFOs analyse businesses
• What management expects from FP&A teams
• Board reporting
• Managing profitability and cash flow
• Forecasting under uncertainty
• Strategic business partnering
• Finance transformation
• Impact of AI on future finance roles