Financial information to gather and assess from your business environment for planning and operations
Business environmental monitoring gathers internal and external data that could affect a company. Business leaders and financial analysts can examine that data to identify implications for their company and develop strategies for those implications. These strategies often mitigate threats or capture opportunities. Companies that better understand their business environment can anticipate and plan for changes, build more accurate financial projections, and allocate resources more effectively.
 This course focuses on Finance's role in environmental analysis. You'll learn the types of data that should be monitored by Finance. The course then explains popular models for analyzing that data.
 You'll learn:
·        The steps in the environmental monitoring cycle
·        The basics and uses of common-size analysis in environmental monitoring
·        What to analyze: both internal and external, and from the industry level to the customer level
·        Sources of financial business environment information
·        Models to organize and synthesize environmental information for planning and decision-making
This course is useful for business leaders and financial staff who are involved in any of these processes:
·        Strategic planning
·        Budgeting, financial projects, and financial modeling
·        Identifying best practices and benchmarks
·        Product and customer profitability analysis
·        Mergers and acquisitions
·        Tax planning
·        Setting owners' distributions or dividends
Founder of CFO Perspective
Rob Stephens is the Founder of CFO Perspective, which provides continuing education courses for CPAs and financial management courses for business advisors and staff. He has been quoted in Forbes, U.S. News and World Report, Bloomberg Businessweek, and many other news sources. He is also the author of Key Performance Indicators and KPI Dashboards. Rob has a 30-year career that includes serving as a CFO, Director of Operations, and SVP of Finance. Rob is an adjunct instructor for the MBA program at Gonzaga University. Rob holds a Masters of Science in Personal Financial Planning and a Graduate Certificate in Financial Therapy from Kansas State University. He received a B.A. in Business Administration from the University of Washington.
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.
