US CMA - Financial Planning, Performance and Analytics

Explore how the master budget links sales, production, materials, labor, and overhead to the cost of goods sold and cash flow, creating the annual profit plan and supporting schedules.

Explore budgeting concepts, including the budgeting process, performance statements, and proforma forecasts, to align resources with organizational goals through planning, coordination, communication, and control.

Learn how board directors, top level management, and budget committees coordinate to propose, negotiate, review, and revise the master budget. Grasp standards, cost components, and resource allocation.

Explore budgeting methodologies, from zero-based and incremental to activity-based and flexible budgeting, and learn to integrate these into a master budget with cost drivers and pro forma statements.

Learn forecasting techniques to link budgeting with sales, using regression analysis, time series, learning curves, and probability to predict future demand, costs, and resources.

Develop strategic planning by aligning corporate, competitive, and functional strategies with internal and external environments, stakeholders, and global considerations.

Analyze how external forces and internal capabilities shape strategic planning, using SWOT, Porter’s five forces, contingency planning, scenario analysis, and the BCG matrix to drive competitive advantage.

Top management uses monster budget and pro forma statements to set targets through sensitivity analysis. It emphasizes cash flow, performance statements, and ratio analysis to forecast and maximize shareholder value.

Explore supply chain management from sourcing to delivery, and apply lean resource management techniques like Kaizen and just-in-time to maximize customer value and minimize waste.

Learn how material requirement planning (MRP) links demand forecasts, material components, and lead times to generate production orders, optimize inventory, and coordinate scheduling.

Explore how globalization drives coordinated supply chain management through an integrated ERP system that tracks inventory, forecasting, and orders, delivering efficiency, security, and improved customer satisfaction.

Explore inventory control and just-in-time strategies within a lean supply chain, emphasizing downstream and upstream flows, demand signals, and close supplier collaboration to reduce inventory and boost on-time delivery.

Outsourcing shifts production or services to external providers, covering make-or-buy decisions, contract manufacturing, insourcing, and business process outsourcing, offering focus, expertise, and cost benefits with potential risks.

Explore the theory of constraints in supply chains, detailing inventory, throughput accounting, and the drum-buffer system, and explain how to identify, exploit, subordinate, elevate, and repeat to maximize throughput.

Identify and manage the system constraint with the five steps: identify, exploit, subordinate, elevate, repeat; focusing on throughput contribution, inventory impact, and cash flow via throughput costing.

Explore capacity planning and the cost of capacity, including fixed costs and idle capacity. Compare practical and theoretical capacity, and explain how predetermined overhead rates influence pricing.

Analyze how business process improvement enhances efficiency and competitive advantage through value chain analysis, identifying value-added activities and reducing non-value added costs.

Explore steps in value chain analysis to identify value-creating activities, determine competitive advantage, evaluate cost drivers, and connect supply chain and lifecycle costing to support strategy and growth.

Explore process analysis fundamentals, including defining processes, identifying profitability drivers, and using analytic methods to improve effectiveness, efficiency, and adaptability through process improvement and engineering.

Learn how fundamental analysis and radical redesign of business processes in BPR enable dramatic improvements in cost, quality, speed, and service.

Identify how to apply best practice analysis and benchmarking across contexts using gap analysis, while embracing TQM and kaizen to boost quality and performance.

Learn the seven-phase benchmarking process to measure performance against best-in-class standards, including internal and external benchmarks, and implement data-driven improvements.

Understand internal controls as a process to mitigate risk, via control environment, risk assessment, control activities, information and communication, and monitoring, including preventive, detective, and compensating controls.

Explore internal audit types—compliance, operational, functional, and consulting—and examine information system controls, including input, processing, and output controls, application controls, and business continuity and disaster recovery planning.

Explore the data governance lifecycle, from capture and maintenance to synthesis, publication, archiving, and destruction, and learn how record retention supports regulatory compliance.

Explore the system development lifecycle, from planning and analysis to design, implementation, and maintenance, to build efficient computer-based information systems that meet customer needs and improve business processes.

Explore how robotics process automation and artificial intelligence transform finance transformation by automating repetitive tasks, boosting efficiency, consistency, and speed with rule-based systems and intelligent analytics.

Identify cyber threats such as malware, phishing, and denial of service, then apply prevention, detection, and correction. Implement multifactor authentication and firewalls to protect data and access.

Explore technology-enabled finance transformation through cloud computing, software as a service, and blockchain, highlighting cloud benefits, data security, and the rise of smart contracts and cryptocurrency.

Explore enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, their centralized real-time integration across finance, production, sales, and HR, and how DBMS and data warehouse support data integrity and analytics.

Understand how accounting information systems use software and ERP to integrate revenue, production, HR, and finance cycles into financial statements with internal controls and CRM insights.

Linking strategy to planning and budgeting, enterprise performance management (EPM) enables real-time dashboards, scenario analysis, and holistic decision making to improve organizational performance.

Explore how data governance uses formal policy and procedures within a COSO-based framework to ensure data availability, integrity, confidentiality, usability, and security across digital systems.

Explore data visualization forms like pie, line, bar, histogram, dot, bubble, and potato charts, dashboards, and tables. Learn to select visuals for big data, audience, and clear communication.

Explore the accounting information system (AIS) and its move from manual to computerized processes, covering the revenue and expenditure cycles, general ledger, and ERP-enabled data integration with CRM and SCM.

Explore the data lifecycle from capture and input to processing and analytics. Understand archiving, governance, quality, metadata, and authentication and authorization.

learn to govern data assets through policy, quality, and access controls that ensure confidentiality, integrity, availability, and usability; apply controls and frameworks like COSO and ISACA for governance and compliance.

Safeguard electronic information and defend against malware and ransomware, as well as unauthorized access, to reinforce cyber risk governance in financial systems.