Self-Study: Surgent's Controllership Skills Update: Current Survival Skills

Overview

This course is available until April 30, 2025.

The role of financial professionals has and continues to change in organizations. The stereotype of collecting and reporting data has been replaced by a broader vision, which focuses on improving an organization’s results today and preparing it for the future. This brief program offers specific actions that can be implemented by financial personnel to expand their role through improving their organization. The actions and techniques provided build upon and improve activities that exist in many organizations (measuring, budgeting, hiring, risk management, etc.), as well as providing insights into capital allocation, cash management, valuation techniques, variables that influence capacity levels, M&A activity and actions to increase efficiency and innovation. Updated to include the impact of tax regulations, additional examples of M&A, alliances and strategic spin-offs/splits, methods to improve efficiency from existing activities, and current organizational changes employed to manage and accelerate growth.

Highlights

Changing Role of Financial Professionals:

Priorities
Change in mission
Valued-added actions

Strategic Measurements:

Common errors and guidelines for improvement
Balanced scorecard
Strategy development and implementation
Budgeting basics and next steps

Risk Management:

Recent lessons, including Black Swan events
Defining Enterprise Risk Management (ERM)
Implementation

Developing a Financial Leadership Pipeline:

Changing employment environment
Retaining the right employees
Compensation
Hiring process

Capital Projects:

Types of projects
Factors affecting capacity
Valuation techniques
Cash management

M&A Activity:

Current environment
Controller's role
Strategic questions
Sample transactions
Due diligence
Implementation

Introducing Improvements/Innovation:

Getting started
Establishing an environment
Potential first projects
Organizational structure

Prerequisites

Experience and/or exposure to financial management

Designed For

Public, private and non-profit organizations and their members – CFOs, CEOs, controllers, auditors, and managers

Objectives

Provide an overview of the expanded role of financial professionals
Gain knowledge in a diverse range of activities
Explore analytical valuation techniques that are useful over a board range of events
Understand the potential value of improving existing practices and/or implementing missing ones
Recognize immediate actions that can result in measurable benefits to an organization
Identify specific areas for further exploration