Working Capital Management: Liquidity, Forecasting

This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.

Profitable companies go bankrupt. Not often, but often enough that every finance textbook carries a chapter about it, and every owner who has lived through it can name the exact week payroll nearly failed to clear.

Profit is an accounting opinion about a period. Cash is a fact about a Tuesday.

The gap nobody owns

Most companies have someone who owns the profit and loss statement and nobody who owns the calendar of when money actually arrives and leaves. So the invoice goes out on the thirtieth, the client pays on the sixtieth, the supplier wants paying on the fifteenth, and the salaries go out on the fifth regardless. Nothing in that sentence is a management failure. It is arithmetic. But when nobody is holding the arithmetic, it turns into a phone call to the bank at nine in the morning, and the terms you get on that call are the worst terms you will ever be offered, because everyone can see you have no alternative.

What changes when someone owns the cash calendar

You stop discovering problems and start scheduling them. A rolling forecast tells you in March that the third week of June is thin, which means you have eleven weeks to fix it, and eleven weeks is enough time to renegotiate terms, chase receivables, delay a purchase or arrange financing at a normal price. The same shortfall discovered on the Friday before is a fire sale. The skill is not sophistication. It is being early.

Where this comes from

I have built finance and operations systems inside companies that were growing fast and companies that were cutting hard, including Preply, Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank. Over 1.6 million people have enrolled in my courses and more than 150,000 professionals have been trained through them. I hold PHRi and SHRM-CP certifications and represent HRCI in more than ten countries. The material here is what I have actually watched work, not a syllabus assembled from textbooks.

How the course is built

You start inside the finance function: controls, risk, the cash conversion cycle, free cash flow and break-even. Then the mechanics of money in motion — budgeting, rolling forecasts, pricing, capital budgeting, and a full section on cash forecasting, cash gaps, concentration and pooling. Then where money comes from when your own is not enough: deposits and the money market, factoring, invoice discounting, inventory financing and leasing, equity and venture funding, credit ratings, public listing and investor relations. Then the operating side that produces and consumes the cash: operating models, process design, automation, structure, infrastructure and procurement. Then where the leaks are — bottlenecks, queues, downtime, duplicated work, and the weekly rhythm that catches them. And finally the part most courses skip: what companies actually do when the cash runs short, including how payroll, bonuses, benefits and headcount get cut, and how to do it without destroying the team you will need on the other side.

What is included

• Lifetime access to all 44 lessons and every future update

• Active instructor support in the question and answer section

• Udemy Certificate of Completion

• Practical assignments built on real business situations

• A section with additional courses, tools and resources

Why start now

Cash problems are the only business problems that get more expensive by the day, and the cost curve is not linear — the same shortfall costs a renegotiated payment term in March and a personal guarantee in June. Every month you postpone this is a month you keep making decisions on profit figures that do not tell you when the money arrives. Enrol now and start the first lesson today.