Finance for HR

These training modules are addressed to HR Professionals without formal education in finance, who, because of their day-to-day needs, are involved in a financial process and are required to apply and interpret information contained in financial statements.

Objectives

After completing these training modules, you will be able to:

• Identify HR issues by applying financial skills
• Understand how business decisions made by you impact key elements of your company’s financial statements
• Feel confident when talking to partners from the finance department
• Participate in the budgeting process more effectively and efficiently

Benefits

Training methodology

This is an interactive and case-study-based course.

Carefully chosen case studies aligned with interactive and focused training will inspire participants and transform theory into practical learning and application, a form of learning which is simply not possible with a traditional presentation or lecture. And is a lot more fun too!

With this training methodology, once you go through a real life business situation, you will never forget the tools learned. During a case study you have the freedom to apply the taught knowledge, assess the impact and re-adjust your techniques as often as needed, until you make your final decision, just as you would test (and taste) products in a festival! This cannot happen in a lecture or presentation.

Training materials will be comprehensive with theory, summaries, key points, exercises and illustrations, self-testing questions and case studies with full model solutions.

Module 1

Financial Statement Analysis and the HR process: Value Creation

During this module you will:

• Observe how real-life flow of transactions end up in financial statements – (With illustrations and examples).
• Understand how items from the flow of transactions either go on to the balance sheet or to the income statement – (Case Study).
• Go through exercises and mini case studies touching key balance sheet and income statement positions – rules for recognition and measurement include:
• Assets – can our people be shown as assets?
• Intangible assets – perhaps our people are such assets?
• Provisions – are future events actually shown in current financial statements?
• Employee Benefits e.g. Retirement Benefit Schemes – are these future payments shown as costs in the future or in the present?
• Review of real-life set of audited financial statements
• Understand the link between Cash Flow, Income Statement and Balance Sheet – (Case Study).
• Experience analysing and interpreting Financial Statements – (With illustrations and examples).
• Enjoy obtaining practical skills from a major case study – you look at a set of audited financial statements of five years and you will be able to:
• Identify problems in the business, HR issues and their root causes
• Link the various strategies together, including the HR strategy
• Come up with solutions to improve the health of the company in the medium as well as the long term

Module 2

Financial Management: Budgeting, ROI Analysis, and Value Demonstration

 It is advisable to attend Module 1 before Module 2

During this module you will:

• Understand functions and purposes of budgeting (and you may be surprised!)
• Apply costing techniques and appreciate the importance of overheads, for example in pricing decisions (Case Studies)
• Identify HR issues by applying Variance Analysis (Case Studies)
• Participate in case studies on alternative budgetary systems like zero-based, rolling and activity-based budgeting
• Understand the importance of cost structure and classification into Fixed, Variable, Direct and Indirect costs (Case Study)
• Appreciate Break-Even Analysis to support your budgeting decisions – (With illustrations and examples).
• Calculate the Return on Investment (ROI) in a practical case study