Traditional annual budgeting is often viewed as outdated, inflexible, and disconnected from strategy—quickly becoming irrelevant, easily manipulated, and too cumbersome to support real decision-making. This course introduces capacity-sensitive, driver-based budgeting as a modern alternative. By linking financial projections to business drivers, organizations can create agile budgets that adapt to growth, enable rapid scenario planning, and provide meaningful insights for long-term forecasting. Participants will learn how to refresh budgets into rolling forecasts and transform managerial accounting into a tool for strategic, economics-based decision-making.
Learning Objectives
Understand how to create driver-based budgets and rolling financial forecasts
Major Topics
The shift to “predictive accounting” for Decision Making, Planning, and Budgeting Problems with traditional annual budget processes Develop a driver-based “operational budget” based on resource capacity planning Classify resource capacities and their expenses as sunk, fixed, step-variable, and variable Create closed loop capacity plans Forecast demand for budgeting and rolling financial forecasts Integrating enterprise risk management (ERM) with management accounting Applying target costing for cost estimating
