Thinking Like a CFO: Mind-set and Financial Priorities


Overview/Description
Target Audience
Expected Duration
Lesson Objectives
Course Number


Overview/Description
Effective management of your departmental operations in terms of productivity, efficiency, and quality is important, but it's no longer enough to ensure success. You must also ensure you align your decisions and departmental activities with your organization's financial goals. You can do this by investing your resources profitably, maintaining a healthy cash flow, and managing your business risks adequately. Thinking like a chief financial officer, or CFO, in your everyday decision making and management can help you achieve these goals. Adopting a CFO mind-set will give you a better understanding of your organization's financial priorities and assist you in getting your CFO's buy-in for your budgets, project plans, and proposals requiring investment. This course provides some basic tips to get you started thinking like a CFO and explains why it's important to have that perspective. It then details the various responsibilities of CFOs in organizations to help you understand their viewpoint. The course then presents a practical outline of how CFOs pursue three of their basic priorities: managing costs, supporting revenue growth, and managing cash flows in the organization. Understanding how CFOs accomplish these priorities can help you achieve your departmental goals more effectively.

Target Audience
Functional managers, professionals, departmental leaders, and all individuals in key roles who want to align their financial planning and management activities with CFO thinking

Expected Duration (hours)
1.0

Lesson Objectives

Thinking Like a CFO: Mind-set and Financial Priorities

  • identify the value of adopting a CFO mind-set
  • recognize appropriate actions to help you think like a CFO
  • recognize what CFOs do in organizations
  • recognize how cost structure affects CFO decision making
  • use CVP to calculate sales required to achieve a desired profit
  • recognize ways of effectively managing cash in an organization
  • Course Number:
    mgmt_30_a01_bs_enus