
Financial and Business Modelling
This course will help you grow your skills so that you can make advanced level decisions that enhance the value of your organisation. This will assist you with eventually reaching a top-level management position.
“90% of companies in the UK fail due to inappropriate forecasting” — Office for National Statistics
“82% middle-level skill requirement is proficient using productivity software” — The Digital Edge
“80% of CFOs have enhanced their firm’s value using finance work” — McKinsey Special Collection
Why study this course?
The financial and business modelling program facilitates your growth to top-level management by inculcating skills that help you make advanced level decisions that enhance value of the organisation.
The program is designed to equip you with analytical mind in quickly scanning the business news and environment, assess their impact on businesses top and bottom line, also known as revenue and profitability and to also strategize business decisions. The modelling techniques include employment of spreadsheet modelling productively for applications like financing, investment, and valuation decisions. It also equips you with forecasting techniques in order to enhance your visionary insight. The focus will be both of managing financial data as well as making meaningful sense of the data for informed business decisions.
Financial and business acumen is required in all departments, from marketing to operations, purchase, and production, etc. The program is helpful for learners of all background who aspire to manage businesses as employees or entrepreneurs in business start-up. In fact, financial and business modelling acumen helps in your development in organisational hierarchy, because it teaches you to use free software to your strengths and back business decision with data.
Who should take this course?
This course is developed for professionals aspiring to manage an organisation and make high level business decisions backed by data. In specific, the following will benefit most from the course:
- Middle to top level business managers responsible to enhance the value of the firm.
- Entrepreneurs who wish to plan future business performance to decide upon the funding and corresponding shareholding percentage.
- Investors who aim to invest based upon future forecasting of financial data.
Please note that this course is only available to students at BSBI enrolled on a number of courses. If you are an external prospective student, please complete the form and discuss this with an education advisor. If a current student, please speak to your academic team.
Modules
Introduction to Financial Modelling
This module elaborates on the meaning of financial modelling. You will acknowledge the differentiation between a spreadsheet and a financial model including other various types of financial models. The module will cover reflecting on model design, structure, layout and planning to prepare well-thought-out design to project a clear plan for building a model. The golden rules and design flaws will also be discussed.
Modelling Risk and Realities
This module allows you to analyse historical stock returns downloaded from market websites on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. Regression analysis will be conducted to estimate beta. The analysis will help you to build upon portfolio and select stocks for reducing the unsystematic risk. Learning the fundamentals such as mean-variance portfolio selection and modelling formulae will enable you to select stocks very quickly.
Building a Model and Presenting the Output
This module will allow you to build tools using popular techniques, gain an understanding of the most common errors and best ways to avoid them, and reflect upon the issues and decisions a financial modeller will encounter. To prepare the model, you will learn common excel functions that are relevant for business decisions like Pivot, V lookup, finance functions, logical functions, absolute and relative references. Further to this you will review the commonly used input, workings and output presentation of a model.
Forecasting Cash Flows and Modelling Cost of Capital
This module reiterates the fundamentals of accounting and finance such as three financial statements, cost of capital, key variables within the statements and their analysis so as to prepare assumptions for forecasting income statements, balance sheet and cash flows. The module will then elaborate modelling cost of capital that will help value the company or the project.
Stress Testing, Scenarios and Sensitivity in Financial Modelling
Scenarios and sensitivity analysis allows you to perform stress testing and decipher the robustness of your model. It also allows you to understand that future forecasting is subject to market sensitivity, and therefore preparing scenarios to incorporate the same ensures adequate planning and preparing for the future. The accuracy of the scenarios lies in the accuracy of the assumptions forecasted in the model.

Assignment
- Relevance of Financial Modelling: Justify the need for business and financial modelling in business environment.
- Building a Model Present: Input and output using FAST Modelling methods.
- Valuing a Company Prepare: Pro-forma financial statements based on assumptions drawn from past financial statements for a chosen company and value the company using discounted cash flow method of valuation.
- Planning your portfolio: Plan your investments using mean-variance analysis of evaluating portfolio risk and return by preparing a portfolio of two stocks.
- Scenario Analysis: Present the output of a given model in worst case and best-case scenario by changing the input variables.
How will you learn?
- Live learning from expert faculty
- Learning from an industry expert
- Committed support team
- High-tech learning platform
- 1 day dedicated synchronous classes
- 3 weeks asynchronous reflective learning
- Form discussion for peer-to-peer learning
- Integrated assignments
- Breakout rooms
- Questions and answers
- Writing skills
- Flexible learning
What skills will you gain?
After the end of this programme, you will be able to:
- Evaluate corporate development opportunities and plan business requirements.
- Predict financial risks and strategise minimising them in time.
- Assess prospective acquisitions opportunities and employ useful quantitative tools to estimate the deal value.
- Analyse quality of earnings and investments to model them for future in various circumstances.
- Strategise business actions which are backed by data and enhance the value of the organisation.