Course Description
The course is designed to take participants through different levels of modeling complexity to enable them to achieve their desired level of proficiency. The entire focus of the course is to teach techniques that will enable you to design and construct financial models that are not only functional but also accurate, reliable, flexible, user-friendly and maintainable. The course has been carefully designed to meet the needs of a variety of different users and their differing levels of expertise.
What Do Participants Learn?
- Become familiar with an impressive range of Excel facilities and tools;
- Appreciate the nature and use of new facilities in the latest versions of Excel;
- Use a variety of simple and complex Excel functions with confidence;
- Create dashboards and reports that are informative, enlightening and insightful;
- Formulate and solve problems using optimization techniques;
- Design and build macros and user-defined functions;
- Use macros to extend the functionality and enhance the usability of financial models;
- Clean up, enhance and generally manage raw data for modeling purposes;
- Understand the nature of financial models and their application areas;
- Plan, design, construct and prove modeling applications for planning and decision-making;
- Use the facilities of Excel to prepare forecasts of financial statements and cash flows;
- Build models to evaluate projects and perform company valuations;
- Use tables, scenarios and other tools of sensitivity analysis;
Who Should Attend?
- Executives and managers
- Sales and marketing professionals
- Accountants and lawyers
- Corporate financiers
- Investment bankers
- Commercial Bankers
- Treasury professionals
- Financial and credit analysts
- Investment analysts and fund managers
- Engineers
- Front and back office staff
- Administrative professionals
What Will the Learning Experience Include?
Phase: 1
Introduce
- Comprehensive pre-program activities include:
- Web-based information forms & surveys completed by attendee.
- Direct consultation with the attendee about the expectations.
- During the training, participants engage in data, activities, and conversations that lead to insight and knowledge.
- Participants learn from expert trainers who have both academic and business experiences.
- Highly applicable training content & instructive activities for adding depth to training topics.
- **A half-day site visit for integrating the experience & plan next steps. Opportunities to provide connections, ideas & support.
Phase: 2
Explore & Practice
Phase: 3
Apply
- Apply & sustain the learning experience by using this ongoing support:
- To ensure participant has new skills or behavior progress.
- Optional, fee-based mentoring & coaching with the trainer.
- Training materials & additional documents (e-books, pdf files, presentations and articles)
- Evaluate your training experience by giving us feedbacks and help us to reach our organizational goals.
- Participant's Evaluation
- Trainer's Evaluation
Phase: 4
EVALUATE
SECTION ONE: ADVANCED MICROSOFT EXCEL SKILLS
- Introduction – Speed Networking
- Getting Off to a Flying Start!
- Using Excel Functions to Advantage
- Using Power Tools in Excel
- Creating Dashboards, Reports & Charts
- Exercises: You will design and implement a proper dashboard and reporting capability within a model that will inform, enlighten and provide valuable insights for the intended user.
SECTION TWO: MACRO DESIGN & CONSTRUCTION AND OPTIMISATION TECHNIQUES
- Optimisation Techniques in Financial Modelling
- Introduction to Spreadsheet Macros
- More on Programming using VBA
- Creating User-defined Functions
- You will be provided with a number of pre-written functions that are not operating as intended. You will debug the functions to ensure that they are operating correctly.
SECTION THREE: PROFESSIONAL APPROACHES TO MODEL DESIGN & CONSTRUCTION AND FINANCIAL FORECASTING
- Professional Approach to Building a Financial Model
- Forecasting for Modelling Applications
- Forecasting Financial Statements
- Case study
- You will create an application to analyze historical financial statements belonging to a real company and then use the analysis to prepare a one-year forecast of the key numbers on the financial statements.
- Modeling Value at Risk (VaR) Calculations
SECTION FOUR: DESIGN & CONSTRUCTION OF MODELS FOR COMPANY VALUATION & PROJECT APPRAISAL
- Session 1 – Modelling the Weighted Average Cost of Capital (WACC)
- Session 2 – Constructing Models for Project & Investment Appraisal and Decision-Making
- Session 3 – Constructing Models for Company Valuation & Related Applications
- Valuation Modelling Case Study
SECTION FIVE: ADVANCED MODELLING CONCEPTS, TOOLS, AND TECHNIQUES
- Financial Modelling for Leasing Applications
- Exercise: Using the project evaluation model which you created on day four of the course, you will examine the impact of different modes of financing on the financial viability of the project.
- Using Monte Carlo Simulation for Risk Evaluation in Financial Modelling
- Exercise: You will use the project evaluation model which you created on day four of the course to explore the advantages of using Monte Carlo Simulation to analyze the risk profile of the project.
- Financial Options and Options Pricing Models
- Exercise: You will use the Black-Scholes model and the binomial model to price a variety of financial options and then comment on your findings.
- Walking Through Real-life Models
- In this session to wrap-up the course, the course director will walk you through a number of real-life substantive models in order to introduce you to several of the complexities and challenges that modelers face in the workplace. He will also suggest ways in which such complexities and challenges can be managed.