Move beyond the numbers to become a strategic advisor and master capital allocation.
Financial intelligence is what separates technical accounting professionals from trusted strategic advisors. This course is designed to elevate how you think, analyze, and communicate as a financial professional — moving beyond the mechanics of preparing financial statements to using them as a tool for influencing decisions at the highest levels of an organization.
Drawing on decades of executive finance experience, this course shows you how a seasoned financial executive interprets financial information through the eyes of the various stakeholders sitting around the boardroom table — CEOs, board directors, investors, lenders, and senior managers — and translates raw financial data into the insights each of them needs to make better decisions.
Across the contextual timeline of financial reporting, management accounting, and finance, you will learn how to tease out the stories embedded in the income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow statement. You will explore how to evaluate the quality of revenue, interpret margins and returns, assess working capital management, evaluate financial leverage, approximate the value of equity using napkin math, and understand the ten levers of capital allocation that distinguish great companies from merely good ones. The course also introduces the fundamentals of finance — discounted cash flow analysis, sensitivity testing, and capital budgeting decisions — to round out the long-term decision-making perspective.
Whether you are an aspiring controller, a seasoned CFO, or a finance professional looking to step into a more strategic role, this course will help you develop the credibility, communication, and judgment required to become an indispensable advisor in any organization.
This course reflects Canadian regulatory and tax context, including capital cost allowance tax shield formulas, normal course issuer bid rules, and Canadian company case studies.
CPA, CA Leadership
Blair is a seven-time CFO, a director, and an educator at Executive Finance Partners - a professional development and executive coaching firm for financial professionals and executives. He also serves as a corporate director and audit committee chair of publicly listed companies: Terravest Industries and Clarke Inc. He is also the Board Treasurer of the Devour Food & Film Festival and serves on various committees of CPA Nova Scotia. Blair is the author of The Illiterate Executive: An Executive’s Handbook for Mastering Financial Acumen.
Provincial regulators of CPAs in Canada do not require that independent providers of CPD be approved to offer courses. Instead, individual CPAs are responsible for assessing whether a CPD activity meets their requirements, and may take activities from any source provided those requirements are met.
Every course offered on LearnFormula is delivered by a qualified subject matter expert or learning organization, and advances learning objectives that are relevant to the responsibilities or professional competencies of Canadian CPAs. All activities on LearnFormula are quantifiable in terms of hours, and are also verifiable, in that users receive documented evidence of their attendance via a certificate of completion after finishing a course (and this certificate is stored by LearnFormula indefinitely). Nearly 100,000 Canadian CPAs successfully satisfy their CPD requirements via LearnFormula on an annual basis.
