Maintaining an Accurate Vision of Your Company's Financial Future
Annual budgets quickly lose their accuracy and relevance as the fiscal year progresses. A rolling forecast is a tool many companies have implemented to maintain an accurate financial picture of the future and to continuously promote strategic thinking. Some companies replace traditional budgets with rolling forecasts and other processes.
Rolling forecasts provide better readiness for a changing business environment, improved cash flow planning, and more meaningful variance reporting.
The best practice use of rolling forecasts begins by clarifying the roles of budgets and forecasts. Specifically, forecast accuracy is increased by separating it from performance management and compensation processes. The efficiency needed to perform forecasts throughout the year is achieved through driver-based forecasting. Eliminating traditional budgeting also frees up resources for rolling forecasts.
Rolling forecasts have many benefits, but they won't solve all your problems. They may create some new challenges for you.
Learning Objectives
By the end of this course, participants will be able to:
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.
