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Financial Forecasting, Budgeting, Scenario Planning
2,942 students
Financial Forecasting, Budgeting, Scenario Planning
Financial forecasting | budgeting | сash flow management | financial modeling | scenario planning | FP&A | CFO skills
Last updated 9/2026
English
English [Auto],
What you'll learn
- Build a financial model of a business from the operating model down to the metrics that show whether it is actually working
- Prepare a budget by cost line, defend it in front of management and control execution against the plan
- Forecast cash flow, spot cash gaps before they happen and manage working capital through them
- Run capital budgeting decisions with net present value, payback analysis and bottleneck logic
- Build scenarios instead of a single forecast, and know which assumptions each one rests on
- Plan headcount and payroll as the largest cost line, using FTE, GAP analysis and optimisation methods
- Choose a funding route between debt, equity, leasing and factoring, and understand what each really costs
- Run a strategy session that converts a financial plan into owned actions with KPIs and deadlines
- Learn alongside Mike's 1.6 million students from 185 countries
- Get the author's experience from Preply, Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank
Explore related topics
Course content
19 sections • 52 lectures • 33h 47m total length
Requirements
- No accounting or finance degree is required — every concept is built up from the basics
- Basic comfort with numbers and percentages
- Access to your own company's figures, or a business you can model, to apply each method
- English at an intermediate level or above, since all lessons are in English
- A spreadsheet of any kind for building the model and the budget
Description
This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.
Your company can be profitable on paper and still run out of money in March. Most managers find that out the hard way.
What is going wrong right now
You are asked to submit a budget and you build it by taking last year and adding a percentage. You are asked whether the project pays off and you answer with a feeling. Someone mentions cash flow versus profit and you nod. Then the year turns out differently from the plan, nobody can explain which assumption broke, and the conversation moves on to cutting costs across the board because nobody knows where the money actually goes. Every one of those moments is a decision made without a model.
What changes after this course
You will build the model instead of guessing at it. You will know what your business earns per unit, where the cash physically sits during the month, which cost lines respond to which decisions, and what happens to all of it under three different scenarios rather than one optimistic line. You will defend a budget with numbers that hold up under questioning, evaluate an investment with net present value rather than enthusiasm, and choose between debt and equity knowing what each one really costs you.
Your instructor
Mike, the number one HR instructor on Udemy, with more than 1.6 million course enrolments and over 150,000 professionals trained. Holder of PHRi and SHRM-CP certifications and HRCI representative in more than 10 countries. Built the people function of the unicorn Preply and worked at Wargaming, Alfa-Bank and iDeals.
How the course is built
The course moves from the whole business down to the individual decision and back out again. It opens with the operating model: what makes a business efficient, how strategy becomes a set of financial goals, where processes quietly consume money, and how KPIs connect customers, people, processes and finance. Then it turns to budgeting in detail, line by line, including the largest and least understood one — people, covering payroll, headcount planning, FTE, GAP analysis and optimisation. The core of the course is the CFO block: risk, controls, cash conversion, capital budgeting with net present value, cash gaps, pricing, mergers, and the full range of funding from factoring to an IPO. The course closes by turning all of it into a strategy session that produces owned actions with metrics rather than a document nobody opens.
What is included
• Lifetime access to all course materials
• Active instructor support in the Q&A section
• Udemy Certificate of Completion
• Practical assignments and real business cases
• A section with additional courses, tools and resources
Why start now
Every planning cycle you get through on instinct is one where somebody else in the room is making the decisions. Financial fluency is the difference between defending your budget and being told what it will be. Enrol now and start the first lesson today.
Who this course is for:
- Managers who own a budget but were never taught how to build or defend one
- Founders and business owners who run the company on intuition and a bank balance
- Finance professionals moving from reporting into planning and forecasting
- Operations, HR and department heads who have to justify spend in financial terms
- Analysts preparing business cases and investment decisions
- Anyone preparing for a CFO or finance director track
- Professionals who freeze when the conversation turns to cash flow and unit economics
- Всех, кто хочет понимать, как HR влияет на финансовые показатели компании