Financial Control in SMEs

The way Small Medium Enterprises (SMEs) approach financial control needs to be different to the approach of large organisations. SMEs are not distracted by share prices and can afford to think long term.

In this course, David Allen encourages accountants to be proactive in the management of their businesses; looking both outwards and forwards and dealing with the inevitable uncertainties that entails.

It looks at how new concepts such as risk management and corporate social responsibility should be considered alongside more traditional techniques like standard costing and budgetary control.

The course contains advice on how to develop a comprehensive structure of financial control appropriate to today’s conditions. The course concludes by looking at how accountants can prepare for a change of ownership.

Financial Control in SMEs is part of our Issues and Debates suite of learning. Issues and Debates courses stimulate intelligent dialogue and debate and provide a valuable and evolving resource of professional knowledge and experience.

These courses are topical, practical and highly relevant to today’s changing market. Each module is split into two activities: Understanding the issues and Putting it into practice. The first encourages you to think about a topic, drawing on your own professional experience and knowledge. The second helps you to put ideas and/or theories into practice as part of your day-to-day work.


Financial Control in SMEs enables the learner to:

• Identify the cost of capital
• Understand corporate responsibility
• Develop tactics and strategy
• Implement delivery based costing
• Identify and deal with potential criticism

The business environment
• Competition and volatility
• Corporate responsibility
• Managerial responses
• Trust and learning

Survival of the most fitted
• Cost of capital
• Why bother?
• Tactics and strategy
• Cash flow

Management accountancy
• Management accounting
• Activity based costing
• Budgetary control
• Capital expenditure

Major strategic issues
• Discounting forecast cash flows
• Residual value
• Heading off criticism
• Earnings and EBITA

This course is designed to appeal to people working in the accounting and finance industry at all levels.

David Allen, is a past president of CIMA and a past chairman of the Management Accounting Committee of the International Federation of Accountants. He was employed for many years by Cadbury Schweppes group holding directorships with various subsidiary companies, notably Cadbury Ltd.