Civil Servants Guide to Budgeting
|
 6th Jul 2010 |
This course forms part of a CMI Certificate in Leadership and Management
|
An interactive hands on day exploring techniques and requirements for building and managing a budget, as well as profiling, forecasting, re-forecasting and variance reporting
Learning Objectives
- Understand Parliament’s role including estimates and votes
- Understand what a budget is and what it is used for
- Understand the different budgeting techniques available, including zero budgeting, bottom up, top down, full and activity costing
- Gain an insight into what challenge rounds are
- Learn how to defend your budget
- Understand the relationship between budgeting and HM Treasury CSR and Spending Review requirements
- Learn the art of profiling and gain tips on how to achieve accuracy
- Understand what forecasting is, and how to do it accurately
- Learn how to re-forecast and undertake regular variance reporting
Programme
| 9:15 | Registration |
| 9:45 | Introduction - relating the day to the public expenditure cycle
Roberta Woodcock, Financial Training Consultant (confirmed) |
| 10:00 | Budgeting methods
Provides an understanding of budgeting techniques including zero budgeting, bottom up, top down, full and activity costing. Techniques will be linked to HM Treasury CSR and Spending Review requirements and those already familiar to delegates. |
| 10:50 | What to consider when developing a budget
Explores exactly what a budget is and what it is used for; explains the different expenditure and income types and investigates information readily available to assist in building a budget and how to deal with difficult or unknown factors.
Practical exercise Using a case study delegates are offered an opportunity to consolidate their learning and to build a scenario based budget |
| 11:40 | Refreshments |
| 12:00 | Defending your budget
Provides an insight into what challenge rounds are, their importance to the organisation and how to prepare for them.
Practical exercise Using the budget previously prepared delegates are faced with typical issues and questions and given an opportunity to explore how they can be dealt with. |
| 12:50 | Lunch |
| 13:50 | The art of profiling
Provides a comprehensive understanding as to why accuracy at this early stage is so important, how it impacts on monthly reporting and monitoring and tips on how to achieve accuracy
Practical exercise Returning to the case study scenario delegates are given an opportunity to practise profiling techniques based on the previous session |
| 14:40 | What is forecasting
Delivers an understanding of why accurate forecasting is important to internal and external users of information. Using a further case study delegates explore why things might go wrong and how to correct information appropriately |
| 15:30 | Refreshments |
| 15:45 | Re-forecasting and Variance Reporting
Explains why keeping forecasts under review is important and explores the need for variance reporting on a regular basis |
| 16:30 | Close |
Please note that the programme is subject to change without notice
