Profit and Loss Analysis

Overview: A Profit and Loss Account can give some excellent information about the financial performance of a business, however reading it only at face value can give a misleading impression. A true, detailed understanding of a Profit and Loss Account is crucial when it comes to making important decisions about which direction your own business moves in or which supplier to work with, what the financial position of customers or potential customers are, who to lend money to, etc.

This course covers a comprehensive review of the Profit and Loss Account, digging deeper into the numbers, considering how the Profit and Loss Account may have been manipulated to provide a particular impression as well as the limitations of the Profit and Loss Account that it is important to be aware of. Course participants will be encouraged to create a personal action plan at the end of this course to consider how they will turn elements of the course into reality once they are back in their work environment.

Course Content:

• Profit and Loss Account structure and terminology
• Analysing the key elements of a Profit and Loss Account including sales, gross profit, operating profit, EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxation, depreciation and amortisation) including percentages
• Consideration of how a Profit and Loss Account may be manipulated and the effect on the numbers:
  • Accounting adjustments
  • Depreciation and amortisation
  • Timings of key decisions
  • Organisation policies and culture
  • Other
• Asking the right questions to probe the facts behind the figures
• Using trends as a technique to analyse Profit and Loss performance
• Limitations of the information available from a Profit and Loss Account
• Who is interested in the Profit and Loss Account and what is it that they are interested in?

Who is it for? This course will be extremely useful for anyone whose role involves reviewing or analysing Profit and Loss Accounts. It would also be of benefit to anyone preparing Profit and Loss Accounts in helping them to understand how they may be interpreted.

Duration: 1/2 day

Tailoring the course: Whilst we are more than happy to provide you with a generic course, we find that tailoring our courses to the particular needs of the course participants and to your own organisation provides the best results by far.

Any of our courses can be tailored to your specific organisation and incorporate your terminology, processes, reports, etc. We find that this really helps the course participants to see the relevance of the course content and assists them with understanding areas of finance that could potentially appear complex as we are using language and examples that they are familiar with and can easily relate to.

Please contact us to discuss how we can make this work best for you.

© 2011 FST&C Ltd in Essex near Cambridge - Financial Training Courses, E-Learning Courses, Financial for Non Financial Managers, Financial Classes, UK
Tel: 01799 540488   Email: enquiries@fstandc.co.uk

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