Your cart is empty.
Keep shopping
Finance for Non-Financial Managers: Budget, P&L, 240+ Tools
2,949 students
Finance for Non-Financial Managers: Budget, P&L, 240+ Tools
Read the numbers and defend your plan: budgeting, three statements, cost control, business case, KPI formulas, templates
Last updated 10/2026
English
English [Auto],
What you'll learn
- Take away 240+ tools: procedures, question lists, checklists, templates, matrices and formulas ready to copy from the presentations
- Read the three financial statements with an income statement template, a balance sheet template and financial KPI formulas
- Build a department budget with a budgeting procedure and checklists for payroll, vacancies, salary review, bonuses and benefits
- Defend spending with a cost-benefit analysis, a training ROI calculation and a decision presentation template
- Use 51 step-by-step procedures: strategic planning, cash flow forecasting, workforce planning and process improvement
- Analyze the business environment with STEEPLE, SWOT, Porter's five forces and a risk probability-impact matrix
- Find where processes waste resources with process mapping, 5S, 5 Whys and SIPOC
- Link the budget to strategy and to four groups of KPIs
- Check money decisions for bias before you commit
- Learn with Mike, the #1 HR instructor on Udemy: 1,800,000+ enrollments, 170,000 students, about 200 books on Amazon
Explore related topics
Course content
15 sections • 42 lectures • 22h 47m total length
Requirements
- No finance or accounting background required: the course starts from what the three statements are
- Experience of managing a team, a project or a budget line is helpful
- A spreadsheet program such as Excel or Google Sheets for the templates and formulas
- Nothing else to buy for the course itself: the worksheet and presentations are attached to the lectures
Description
This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.
244 tools for managers who work with numbers in one course: 131 ready-to-use procedures, question lists, checklists, templates, matrices and formulas, 103 models and methods, 9 services and apps shown on screen, and a downloadable budget worksheet.
Open a lecture, take the tool, use it on your own budget.
Why managers lose the budget conversation
You are good at your job, and then you get a budget. The finance team sends a template you do not understand. You ask for more people and hear "show the numbers". You submit a plan, and it comes back with other figures. Nobody taught you how the company's finances work, how a budget is built or how to argue for a line in it.
What changes after this course
You read an income statement, a balance sheet and a cash flow statement and understand what each one says. You know how the business around the numbers works: environment, competition, strategy, operating model. You build your budget line by line and link each line to a goal. You can show what a decision costs and what it returns. You see where your processes lose resources. And you check your own reasoning before a decision becomes expensive.
What is inside: 244 tools, counted lecture by lecture
You do not have to take this number on trust. Open any lecture and read its description: every tool inside is listed there by name.
- 131 ready-to-use tools inside the presentations:
- 51 step-by-step procedures and workflows: operational cash flow forecasting, HR budgeting, strategic option evaluation, strategic planning
- 24 question lists and scripts: financial health review, overhead budgeting, risk assessment, problem definition
- 18 checklists: payroll budgeting, bonus budgeting, KPI quality, data validation
- 17 templates and sample documents: income statement, balance sheet, budget approval process, recruitment budget
- 11 scorecards, rubrics and matrices: risk probability-impact matrix, benefits cost-effectiveness matrix, opportunity analysis matrix, SWOT analysis
- 9 formulas and metric sets: financial health metrics, financial KPIs, HR initiative cost-benefit analysis, hiring needs calculation
- 1 other working tool
- 103 models and methods explained with examples: net present value, internal rate of return, rolling budget, cash conversion cycle
- 9 services and apps shown on screen, from a quick look to a detailed demo: Microsoft Excel, Yahoo Finance, Lucidchart, Miro, Confluence and others
- 1 downloadable tool file: a budget mistake check and course planning worksheet
Where the tools are
- The business around the numbers (2 sections, 39 tools). Environment, competition, regulation and social trends.
- Strategy and the three financial statements (26 tools).
- The operating model, goals and KPIs (4 sections, 35 tools). Business models, mission, processes, the strategy pyramid, budgeting and four perspectives, lean and scaling.
- Building the budget (2 sections, 53 tools). What to budget, link to strategy, hiring, payroll, bonuses, benefits, training, software.
- Process costs and improvement (3 sections, 77 tools). Waste, process mapping, improvement management, the cost reduction toolkit.
- Thinking clearly about decisions (2 sections, 45 tools). Logic, biases, information quality, decisions under uncertainty.
Who is teaching
I am Mike, the #1 HR instructor on Udemy, with 1,800,000+ course enrollments from 170,000 students, and the author of about 200 books on Amazon. I built the people system at Preply as it became a unicorn and worked at Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank across 20 years in HR. I hold PHRi, SHRM-CP and HCI sHRBP certifications and represent HRCI in Eastern Europe. I am also a founder and lead the strategy of my own academy.
I have been the non-finance manager in this story. At a television company where I worked, the financial data was not published anywhere, and the annual plan was discussed only by the CEO and the CFO. I put the picture together from pieces: a figure in one meeting, a remark in another. Understanding those pieces let me see where the company was going. In the same company the reserves in budgets were always spent, simply because people knew they were there. So the company removed them: if you want to spend above the plan, find a saving somewhere else. It made every team look for savings inside its own budget.
How to use the course
Start with the Start Here lecture and its worksheet. If you need the budget now, go straight to the two budgeting sections and come back to the rest later: section and lecture titles show how many tools are inside, and each lecture description lists them by name.
What is included
- 42 lectures across 15 sections, 23 hours
- 41 downloadable resources: the lecture presentations and a budget worksheet
- 244 tools across the lessons, ready to copy into your own work
- Lifetime access to all materials
- Active instructor support in the Q&A section
- A Udemy Certificate of Completion
Where to start
Open the Start Here lecture, download the worksheet and check your current budget against the five mistakes. Enrol now and start your first lesson today.
Who this course is for:
- Department heads and team leads who received a budget for the first time
- Project and product managers who have to justify spending
- HR, marketing and operations managers who talk to the finance team
- Founders and small business owners without a finance education
- Specialists preparing for a management role