This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.

244 tools for managers who work with numbers in one course: 131 ready-to-use procedures, question lists, checklists, templates, matrices and formulas, 103 models and methods, 9 services and apps shown on screen, and a downloadable budget worksheet.

Open a lecture, take the tool, use it on your own budget.

Why managers lose the budget conversation

You are good at your job, and then you get a budget. The finance team sends a template you do not understand. You ask for more people and hear "show the numbers". You submit a plan, and it comes back with other figures. Nobody taught you how the company's finances work, how a budget is built or how to argue for a line in it.

What changes after this course

You read an income statement, a balance sheet and a cash flow statement and understand what each one says. You know how the business around the numbers works: environment, competition, strategy, operating model. You build your budget line by line and link each line to a goal. You can show what a decision costs and what it returns. You see where your processes lose resources. And you check your own reasoning before a decision becomes expensive.

What is inside: 244 tools, counted lecture by lecture

You do not have to take this number on trust. Open any lecture and read its description: every tool inside is listed there by name.

• 131 ready-to-use tools inside the presentations:
• 51 step-by-step procedures and workflows: operational cash flow forecasting, HR budgeting, strategic option evaluation, strategic planning
• 24 question lists and scripts: financial health review, overhead budgeting, risk assessment, problem definition
• 18 checklists: payroll budgeting, bonus budgeting, KPI quality, data validation
• 17 templates and sample documents: income statement, balance sheet, budget approval process, recruitment budget
• 11 scorecards, rubrics and matrices: risk probability-impact matrix, benefits cost-effectiveness matrix, opportunity analysis matrix, SWOT analysis
• 9 formulas and metric sets: financial health metrics, financial KPIs, HR initiative cost-benefit analysis, hiring needs calculation
• 1 other working tool
• 103 models and methods explained with examples: net present value, internal rate of return, rolling budget, cash conversion cycle
• 9 services and apps shown on screen, from a quick look to a detailed demo: Microsoft Excel, Yahoo Finance, Lucidchart, Miro, Confluence and others
• 1 downloadable tool file: a budget mistake check and course planning worksheet

Where the tools are

• The business around the numbers (2 sections, 39 tools). Environment, competition, regulation and social trends.
• Strategy and the three financial statements (26 tools).
• The operating model, goals and KPIs (4 sections, 35 tools). Business models, mission, processes, the strategy pyramid, budgeting and four perspectives, lean and scaling.
• Building the budget (2 sections, 53 tools). What to budget, link to strategy, hiring, payroll, bonuses, benefits, training, software.
• Process costs and improvement (3 sections, 77 tools). Waste, process mapping, improvement management, the cost reduction toolkit.
• Thinking clearly about decisions (2 sections, 45 tools). Logic, biases, information quality, decisions under uncertainty.

Who is teaching

I am Mike, the #1 HR instructor on Udemy, with 1,800,000+ course enrollments from 170,000 students, and the author of about 200 books on Amazon. I built the people system at Preply as it became a unicorn and worked at Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank across 20 years in HR. I hold PHRi, SHRM-CP and HCI sHRBP certifications and represent HRCI in Eastern Europe. I am also a founder and lead the strategy of my own academy.

I have been the non-finance manager in this story. At a television company where I worked, the financial data was not published anywhere, and the annual plan was discussed only by the CEO and the CFO. I put the picture together from pieces: a figure in one meeting, a remark in another. Understanding those pieces let me see where the company was going. In the same company the reserves in budgets were always spent, simply because people knew they were there. So the company removed them: if you want to spend above the plan, find a saving somewhere else. It made every team look for savings inside its own budget.

How to use the course

Start with the Start Here lecture and its worksheet. If you need the budget now, go straight to the two budgeting sections and come back to the rest later: section and lecture titles show how many tools are inside, and each lecture description lists them by name.

What is included

• 42 lectures across 15 sections, 23 hours
• 41 downloadable resources: the lecture presentations and a budget worksheet
• 244 tools across the lessons, ready to copy into your own work
• Lifetime access to all materials
• Active instructor support in the Q&A section
• A Udemy Certificate of Completion

Where to start

Open the Start Here lecture, download the worksheet and check your current budget against the five mistakes. Enrol now and start your first lesson today.