Professional Development

Price includes refreshments, lunch and course materials.

Level: Foundation

Key issues:

All those involved in marketing or sales should understand the effect of their actions, and the actions of others, upon the organisation’s financial performance.

The purpose of this course:

Unless you understand the financial side of the business, you’re unlikely to make it to top management. Few people in non-financial functions have any understanding of the subject. This workshop will introduce you to the essential financial and accounting concepts and show how they affect marketing. It will help you to assess the financial strength of potential customers as well as how your own activities affect the organisation’s performance.

Who this course is for:

The training will suit anyone who has to deal with finance in their job, or who will do in the future. For example it will suit budget-holders or those who will soon be managing budgets.

Benefits for your organisation:

Organisations will benefit because people will return to the workplace with a greater degree of understanding and will have more confidence. This will help them to prepare better budgets, make more use of management accounts and have better relationships with their finance teams. This should result in more profit and/or better use of the resources that they manage.

Benefits for you as an individual:

You will benefit because you will understand the terminology used by accounts and finance staff, and will feel more confident when involved with them. The course will help you do your job better and help prepare you for senior management, where financial awareness is crucial.

You will learn how to:

• Interpret financial and management accounts
• Produce more accurate budgets
• Carry out ratio analysis and interpretation of key performance indicators
• Use tools such as break-even analysis
• Manage working capital
• Understand terminology such as gearing and return on capital employed

Course content:

• Financial and management accounts
• Cash flow statements
• Profit and loss accounts
• Balance sheets
• Difference between cash and profit
• Analysis of an organisation’s published financial statements
• Analysis of management accounts
• An overview of budgeting – where to begin
• Costing methods and their importance

To take away from the course:

Delegates will leave the course with more skills and understanding, which can then be put to effective use back in the workplace.

Professional Standards

All of our marketing courses are based on CIM's Professional Marketing Standards, ensuring that marketers at all levels of seniority gain the practical skills that employers require to improve business performance. Review our Professional Marketing Standards framework