Discover the importance of financial planning

This three-week course will help you explore budgeting in action as you learn how to start producing budgets.

You’ll gain the skills to prepare both functional and cash budgets, and how you can use these in your context.

By the end, you’ll understand the importance of budgets in planning for cash shortfalls and surpluses and be able to use this skill in your professional or personal life to help manage your finances.

Learn how to produce a functional budget

You’ll explore different functions within a business such as production, labour, overheads, and capital expenditure.

With this knowledge, you’ll gain the skills to create a functional budget – a budget prepared for any function within a business.

Explore a cash and master budget

To develop your budgeting skills, you’ll unpack cash budgets to understand how to detail all cash inflows and outflows. Within this, you’ll explore the difference between cash and profit and how to format a cash budget.

You’ll also discover how to accumulate all lower-level budgets and prepare a master budget to ensure you can create a comprehensive document.

Learn key budgeting skills from industry experts

Finally, you’ll unpack the resource constraints that organisations face on a regular basis, such as shortage of labour or materials. You’ll learn how to use limiting factor analysis to help you maximise profit by handling these constraints.

Learning from the financial experts at Kaplan, you’ll finish the course with practical budgeting skills you can immediately start implementing in your job or home life to make managing your finances easier.

Syllabus

Week 1
Functional Budgets
- Welcome
  This is an introduction to Course 3 of the A Practical Guide to Budgeting ExpertTrack.
- Functional budgets
  In this short activity you will look a bit more at the theory of budgets, that means you are going to see more why budgets are done and start to think about the theory behind them.
Week 2
Cash Budgets
- Welcome
  This week we’re going to look at cash budgets. This continues from what you learned last week about creating a functional budget.
- Cash vs profit
  In this activity, we will look at why cash is important and how it differs from profit.
- Cash from receipts
  In this activity, we will be learning about the first step in the cash budget process – receipts from customers.
- Cash for payments
  This activity looks at the other side of the coin - payments to suppliers.
- Bringing it all together
  This final activity looks back at what we've covered in cash budgets this week and allows you to reflect on what you have covered.
Week 3
Limiting factor analysis
- Welcome
  This week we'll look at what limiting factors are and the best ways to handle them.
- An introduction to limiting factors
  What stops businesses from making unlimited profits? Here, you'll find out what limiting factors are and how they make that dream an impossibility.
- The first steps in limiting factor analysis
  Once you know what a limiting factor is, you need to be able to identify them. This activity will show you how to do that.
- Optimal production plans
  This activity will explain how to identify the best production plan based on your limiting factor analysis.

Prove you're job ready

Highlight the new, job-relevant skills you’ve gained and supplement existing qualifications with a hard-earned, industry-specific digital certificate – plus one for every course within your ExpertTrack.

Learn the latest in your chosen industry or subject.
Complete each course and pass assessments.
Receive certificates validated by the educating organisation.
Impress employers with learning outcomes you can add to your CV.
Make your career dreams a reality.

Download a PDF

Learning on this course

On every step of the course you can meet other learners, share your ideas and join in with active discussions in the comments.

What will you achieve?

By the end of the course, you‘ll be able to...

Calculate functional budgets
Identify the information needed to set functional budgets
Demonstrate how to include different types of receipts and payments
Calculate receivables, payables and discounts
Identify the limiting factor using calculations

Who is the course for?

This course is designed for anyone who wants to learn how to prepare a budget.

It will be most beneficial for those who want to understand why month-end and variance analysis is so important as a way to control the spending of an organisation.

Who developed the course?

Kaplan

Kaplan UK is a leading international provider of educational and career services. Building on a rich heritage of more than 50 years of training accountants and financial professionals, Kaplan UK serves more than 48,000 students a year, both based in the UK and from overseas, who train for AAT, CIMA, ACCA and ICAEW qualifications.

Established
1971
Location
London, UK

About this ExpertTrack

Understand the importance of budgeting for personal and professional finances as you gain the skills to create accurate budgets.

Find out more

Start learning today - free 7-day trial

After your free trial you can:

Pay $39 per month to keep learning online
Have complete control over your subscription; you can cancel any time
Work at your own pace and set your own deadlines at every stage
Only pay while you’re learning; the subscription will cancel automatically when you finish
Complete online assessments to test your knowledge and prove your skills
Earn digital course certificates and a final award that you can share online, with potential employers, and your professional network
Keep access to the content of courses you complete even after your subscription ends

Start your free 7-day trial

Learning on FutureLearn

Your learning, your rules

Courses are split into weeks, activities, and steps to help you keep track of your learning
Learn through a mix of bite-sized videos, long- and short-form articles, audio, and practical activities
Stay motivated by using the Progress page to keep track of your step completion and assessment scores

Join a global classroom

Experience the power of social learning, and get inspired by an international network of learners
Share ideas with your peers and course educators on every step of the course
Join the conversation by reading, @ing, liking, bookmarking, and replying to comments from others

Map your progress

As you work through the course, use notifications and the Progress page to guide your learning
Whenever you’re ready, mark each step as complete, you’re in control
Complete 90% of course steps and all of the assessments to earn your certificate

Want to know more about learning on FutureLearn? Using FutureLearn