This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.

Your company can be profitable on paper and still run out of money in March. Most managers find that out the hard way.

What is going wrong right now

You are asked to submit a budget and you build it by taking last year and adding a percentage. You are asked whether the project pays off and you answer with a feeling. Someone mentions cash flow versus profit and you nod. Then the year turns out differently from the plan, nobody can explain which assumption broke, and the conversation moves on to cutting costs across the board because nobody knows where the money actually goes. Every one of those moments is a decision made without a model.

What changes after this course

You will build the model instead of guessing at it. You will know what your business earns per unit, where the cash physically sits during the month, which cost lines respond to which decisions, and what happens to all of it under three different scenarios rather than one optimistic line. You will defend a budget with numbers that hold up under questioning, evaluate an investment with net present value rather than enthusiasm, and choose between debt and equity knowing what each one really costs you.

Your instructor

Mike, the number one HR instructor on Udemy, with more than 1.6 million course enrolments and over 150,000 professionals trained. Holder of PHRi and SHRM-CP certifications and HRCI representative in more than 10 countries. Built the people function of the unicorn Preply and worked at Wargaming, Alfa-Bank and iDeals. The financial modules of this course are delivered by a practising finance director with CIMA certification, so the capital, funding and reporting material comes straight from the CFO chair.

How the course is built

The course moves from the whole business down to the individual decision and back out again. It opens with the operating model: what makes a business efficient, how strategy becomes a set of financial goals, where processes quietly consume money, and how KPIs connect customers, people, processes and finance. Then it turns to budgeting in detail, line by line, including the largest and least understood one — people, covering payroll, headcount planning, FTE, GAP analysis and optimisation. The core of the course is the CFO block: risk, controls, cash conversion, capital budgeting with net present value, cash gaps, pricing, mergers, and the full range of funding from factoring to an IPO. The course closes by turning all of it into a strategy session that produces owned actions with metrics rather than a document nobody opens.

What is included

• Lifetime access to all course materials

• Active instructor support in the Q&A section

• Udemy Certificate of Completion

• Practical assignments and real business cases

• A section with additional courses, tools and resources

Why start now

Every planning cycle you get through on instinct is one where somebody else in the room is making the decisions. Financial fluency is the difference between defending your budget and being told what it will be. Enrol now and start the first lesson today.