Building a Financial Model

This is course number two in a series of three courses.

Every financial model is built on the same foundations: an understanding of its purpose, who it is for, and its scope.

This course explains how to set up the Excel spreadsheet and complete the initial steps of: 
• building a financial model,
• structuring calculations
• looking into costs and revenues,
• time periods,
• cash balances and
• reporting.

• Set up and build a comprehensive financial model
• Calculate costs and revenues
• Decide which time periods you need to use and when and where to use flags
• Create understandable and useful reports

Setting up a Financial Model
• Who uses a financial model?
• How should I set up a financial model?
• What are the MS Excel settings for financial model build?
• What should be included in a template?
• How should I incorporate FAST principles?

Costs and Revenues
• What are the different ingredients required to calculate the operating costs?
• What would the concept diagram look like?
• How do I build a calculation that I can use to quickly model the operating costs?
• What would be different in the calculation on the revenue?
• How do I build a calculation to quickly model the revenue?

Time Periods
• What time periods should I use?
• What do I need to know about flags?
• Which ingredients are required to calculate the forecast period flag?

Cash Balances
• Why is the cash balance particularly important?
• What is a “balance corkscrew”?
• What should I know about interest?
• How is interest calculated?

Reporting
• What will the recipient want from the summary report?
• Should I use the same rules for building output sheets?
• How do I construct the output sheet?

Accounting and finance professionals in practice and in industry.

This training course has been developed by the Government and Infrastructure Advisory (GIA) Financial Modelling and Analytics team in Grant Thornton UK LLP who specialise in developing, building and reviewing financial models for clients. Grant Thornton is one of the world’s leading organisations of independent assurance, tax and advisory firms.