Cost Management & Budgeting

Organisations face the issue of making difficult costing and budgeting choices that ensure profitable decisions for the company when changes in the financial markets start affecting the economy. Managers and executives must understand the approach behind cost calculation in order to gain a strong balance in allocating resources along with driving and tracking revenues. This course aims to explain the various key elements, concepts and application of Cost Management and Budgeting, which are commonly used for monitoring internal financial performance and making future business plans.

After the workshop, you will be able to:

• gain understanding of the concept of cost management
• know the various factors that affect cost management
• learn to use cost management information for planning and controlling
• define budgeting and its role in planning, controlling and decision making
• understand the budgeting process
• maintain budgetary control

Outline

• Overview of Cost and Management Accounting
  – Differences between Financial Accounting, Cost Accounting and Management Accounting- Understanding nature of costs and their behaviour
• Cost-Volume-Profit Analysis
  – Semi-variable costs
  – Fixed & variable costs
  – Break even analysis
  – Contribution
  – Margin of safety
• Short-term decision making
  – Assessing opportunity to enter contracts
  – Most efficient use of scarce resources
  – To make or buy?
  – To close or continue?
• Costing of product
  – Absorption costing
  – Activity-based costing
  – Identifying cost drivers of activities
• Factors influencing cost management
• Budgets and budgeting
  – Purpose of budgeting
  – Benefits of budgeting
  – Why budget fails?
  – Budgeting process
  – Types of budgeting
• Performance measurement linking budgeting to business objectives
  – Divisional performance by cost, profit and investment centres
  – Budget variance analysis