Understand the benefits of budgeting

Using a budget helps businesses make informed decisions. It gives you a greater understanding of your revenue and provides a plan for the future.

On this three-week course, you’ll delve into the benefits of budgeting as you explore why and how you should budget.

You’ll explore different approaches to budgeting, including top-down, bottom up, and periodic to understand which approach works best for your context.

Explore sources of information

To help you start to prepare a budget, it’s important to first know your sources of information.

You’ll learn which sources of information you’ll need to use in your budget as you explore the difference between data and information.

Delve into costing

You’ll gain an understanding of management accounting and costing, and how to use it in business.

This knowledge will help you categorise costs to ensure you know how to estimate all cost elements of work within your business.

Learn from the experts at Kaplan

Throughout the course, you’ll be guided by the finance specialists at Kaplan.

Learning from their expertise, you’ll finish the course with the knowledge and skills to start creating insightful and accurate budgets.

Syllabus

Week 1
The benefits of budgeting
- Welcome
  An overview of the topics you'll be covering this week.
- Introduction to budgets
  This activity looks at how organisations benefit from using budgets.
- Participation in budget setting
  The following steps will walk you through participation in budget setting.
- Approaches to budgeting
  The following steps will look at various different approaches to budgeting.
Week 2
Sources of information
- Welcome
  Do you know the difference between data and information? What does the term 'information' even mean? Over this next week, you'll explore both of these questions and more.
- Sources of information
  We all need information to make decisions. In this activity, we’ll look at where you can find information.
- Big data
  Big data refers to the fact that there are huge volumes of data, it changes all the time and there are lots of different places that data can come from. Here, we'll explain the principles of big data.
Week 3
Costing
- Welcome
  This week, we'll be exploring how costing fits within budgeting and accounting.
- Using Costing in Business
  Businesses need to understand their costs in a lot of detail. In this activity you will look at how we can classify and break down these costs in a range of different ways.
- Behaviour of Costs
  This activity is going to explain costs in detail and how they change or stay the same in line with activity.

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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...

Explain the seven benefits of budgeting for an organisation
Summarise the need for data when budgeting
Identify sources of information when budgeting
Classify costs in different ways
Produce a standard cost card
Assess different approaches to budgeting

Who is the course for?

This course is designed for anyone who wants to learn more about budgeting within business.

It will be particularly useful for those considering a career change into an accountancy profession, or those who wish to know more about finance.

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.

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