Fundamentals of Forecasting

Get the basic skills you need to accurately predict revenues and costs.Forecasting is critical to the functioning and success of every business, from small companies to giant corporations. In this hands-on seminar, you’ll discover the basics you need to assemble data and build forecasts that help power the operations, finance, production and planning functions in your organization.

You’ll master the foundational vocabulary and skills to create forecasts on your own and learn to translate and appraise the forecasts of others. In addition, you’ll understand how to interpret the meaning of any forecast, whether it’s your own company’s or that of the competition. Whether you’re new to forecasting or simply in need of a briskly-paced refresher, this seminar will help you see into—and plan—your company’s future!

Also Available as:

• Onsite

How You Will Benefit

• Gather the basic facts necessary to start building a forecast
• Limitations—what forecasts can and cannot do
• Choose the proper forecasting technique given available data and forecast goals
• Critique and interpret forecasts and their implications
• Utilize powerful MS Excel® tools—with uses transferable to other disciplines
• Master and use regression tools to make better forecasts
• Use Excel® tools to present forecast data to executive management

What You Will Cover

• Introduction to business forecasting
• Basic statistical techniques
• Forecasting techniques and methods
• Getting started: making underlying assumptions
• Identifying data patterns: exploratory analysis concepts
• Time series and their components
• The use of Excel® as your forecasting tool
• Forecasting performance measurements
• Simple and multivariate linear regression
• Summarizing and displaying data in Excel®
• New directions in financial forecasting

Who Should Attend

Any financial professional who needs to create, maintain and improve the forecasting process at his or her company, as well as professionals in any function who must interpret, analyze and make decisions based on forecasts created by others.

Please bring a laptop equipped with Excel 2010 to this seminar.