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Financial Training
Increase Your Understanding And
Make Better Decisions
"If you are planning for a year, sow rice; if you are planning for a decade plant trees; if you are planning for a lifetime, educate people" (Chinese proverb)
Our financial training solutions have three elements and you may find any or all of them suitable:
Classroom Training
Working individually and with two training companies I have provided short training courses for experienced managers, NVQ levels 3 and 4 students and modern apprentices.
The most popular course has been "Finance for Non-Financial Managers/ Introduction to Finance". This aims to teach people the basics of finance around the three primary accounting statements - the Profit & Loss Account, the Balance Sheet and the Cash Flow Statement and has been very well received by attendees.
Other courses are also available and include:
- Planning & Control of Finance - this covers budgeting and budgetary control, product costing and decision making including capital expenditure proposals and pricing.
- Planning & Control of Projects - this is an introduction to project management.
- Introduction to Strategic Planning - this course looks at the popular tools and techniques for analysing a company's position in the wider business environment.
These courses can each be delivered in one day or as two half day courses if that is more convenient.
When delivered to employees of a single firm or closely related group the courses can be tailored to a workshop environment where the specific skills can be applied to the particular business. This makes the training mean more to the people attending the course and provides a practical link into their day-to-day activities but can extend the training time considerably as relevant issues are debated. In this situation we aim to agree beforehand how strictly we trade-off training time and cost with facilitating relevant business discussions and practical problem solving.
Job Related Training
One of the key differences between our firm and other accountants is our commitment to passing on knowledge and "helping the client help themselves".
Our aim is not to make you dependent upon our services but instead to increase your financial knowledge so that you can make informed decisions by yourself.
Many accounting tasks are fairly easy provided they are done by someone who is conscientious but they can seem daunting to the inexperienced. The traditional solution is to subcontract these tasks to a firm of professional accountants but you will be only too well aware of the problem. It is expensive.
Because our firm is different we have to take an unusual approach. We don't employ trainees and accounts clerks who usually do these activities for clients and consequently we don't have these people to keep busy all day every day. We don't see this work as a source for ongoing fees but as an opportunity to help the client strengthen their own accounting and financial control.
We think that's what clients want - to understand and to be in control of their own finances without incurring high professional fees. And our aim is to help you get there.
We do this by job training. This involves explaining to your staff what is required, being available for queries and reviewing their work, correcting and explaining again where necessary and then building the next layer of knowledge. Your staff enjoy it because they are learning new skills (but they do become more valuable to you and may want a pay rise) and you benefit by reducing the professional fees that you pay every year.
The preparation of management accounts each month is a particular example of an activity that is often subcontracted to a firm of accountants but with the use of modern accountancy software can often be prepared in-house by a competent book-keeper unless there are particular complicating factors. As we explain in the page about Monthly Financial Review, where the in depth understanding of business finance is important is in the interpretation of those accounts, what they mean for the business and what should be done to resolve the issues that are identified.
This approach does rely on you having competent, trustworthy and discrete staff who have got the time (or can make the time) to take on extra work. In some situations, the business performance is a very sensitive issue and you may not want a member of staff to see the entire picture. In this situation we would train your bookkeeper to make all the necessary accounting entries each month but produce the accounts ourselves.
Coaching And Mentoring
Do you employ someone who is very competent at what they do but you would like them to develop more rounded skills or to see the bigger picture? You need better skills but you don't want to lose the current employee.
This situation can arise when you employ a young accountant or promote someone to the main financial role. The person needs someone to lean on and to guide them during difficult or new experiences but you can't do it yourself because you are employing them for their specialist knowledge.
Our solution is to act as a coach and mentor to the employee using our 20+ years of experience of a wide variety of situations. Often all it requires is someone at the end of a phone, to listen to the problem and the proposed solution and to provide the confidence for the person to act. Other times it may require a meeting and more formal definition of the problem and evaluation of the options.
The same also applies for the owner-manager of a small business who is an expert in their own are but needs support in other business functions. Because we have this whole view of the business through the strategic, marketing and financial management work we do, we are able to act as a general business coach.
Our principal consultant Paul Simister started providing consultancy services in 1995 after working in industry. While his employment positions were financially based, he had a reputation for being extremely commercial and held line management responsibilities for sales, purchasing, personnel, production planning and stock control, distribution and transport. As you can see he wasn't just an accountant!
Since then Paul has extended his formal business training by being awarded a Master of Business Administration (MBA) degree from the very highly regarded Manchester Business School, one of the top Business Schools in Europe.
This combination of practical experience and theoretical knowledge is a powerful combination that can be applied to help you develop your own management skills.
As Galileo said 'You cannot teach a man anything: you can only help him to find it for himself.'
That's the purpose of our business coaching and our business library of articles.
Are you making some of the common mistakes that could be holding back your business and costing you thousands of pounds in lost profit - find out here business owners, marketing, sales, employees or finance.
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Last updated 2007-07-04
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