Roles and goals of budgeting: I was inspired by the ideas of budgeting expressed in the course. The concept made me realize that for any kind of financial planning, the importance of budgeting cannot be ignored. The role of budgeting is so important that a financial venture without proper budgeting may fail in achieving its goals. Therefore, proper budgeting is highly required. Furthermore, it must be observed that if the actual budget has exceeded the expected budget what were the reasons that caused this to happen?
Identification of variances: In any financial venture, there are always pre-determined standards that need to be followed. A deviation from such predetermined standards presents any deficiency in the system. Hence, the concept of variance can greatly help in understanding and improving the operations of the firm. It should be noted that the actual reason of the variance may not be due to anything related to finance. There are high chances that cause of variance may be related to other operational reasons beyond the scope of finance but the concept of variance would help the firm to identify the areas and then have an in-depth analysis to find out the causes of variance.
Maximizing the zero base budgeting system: The ideas proposed for zero base budgeting for managers is also an effective piece of information. It helps managers to plan and made tactics create an effective budget on zero base. Not only the idea is highly efficient but it can help students who are to become future financial managers to understand and prepare themselves as to how managers perform in real life situations.
I have found the content of this course more appealing than a standard finance course. This is because the course does not only introduce the basic concepts of finance but effectively elaborate these in detail. Compared to other courses, this particular finance course gave real-world examples of how the course content can be applied. On the other hand, other finance courses focuses on theory. For instance, it touched upon budgeting and finance roles, which can be applied to the real world. It provides various strategies that managers can use in their present operations. This usually is not present in the standard finance course which mostly focuses on defining the concepts of finance to students. Hence, if the course greatly compares with the standard finance course, at the same time, it also has variations which in its essence are beneficial for students and future managers. (Walczak, 2005)
I enthusiastically believe that the course would provide me great benefits in my future career. It will help me in a number of positions that I would be working on. As a finance internee, I can assist my seniors in preparing budgets by working into detail and operating with numbers and formulas expressed in the course. As a finance manager, I would look into issues that caused the actual outcome of planned tactics to deviate from the expected outcome. For this, I would utilize the concept of variance. In my latter career, as a senior finance executive when I would be provided the task to create long term strategies for my firm, the course would again come handy as the course has effectively helped to understand how long term financial strategies are built. There are a number of concepts, ideas, and strategies mentioned in the course that would help me effectively deal with responsibilities of my job. Starting from the basic ratios to the preparation of financial statements on various costing methods showed me the extravagant procedures of finance and how a combination of various methods effectively interprets the financial standings of a company.
I would recommend following changes in the course.
The language of the course need to be more simplified: It must be understood that the students of the course come from varying backgrounds. Some are already introduced the concepts of finance, but many come from nonfinancial background, hence to make them clearly comfortable with the concepts, the language of the course must further be simplified. At the same time, it must be taken care of that details regard the course are not affected.
More examples need to be added in the text: Alongside, numerical and text, it is also required that more and more examples should be added so that the text may become easy to understand and its concept may become more comprehensible and straightforward. For this, I would suggest to include interactive examples created with extra graphics as this would instantly attract the mind of the readers.
I felt the extent of the course to be a bit lengthy. It should be compressed to some extent, without affecting the details. The most important thing is that the length of the course affects the psychology of the student. If it is short and comprehensible student feels comfortable in carrying on with it. At the same time, a lengthy course distracts student's mind however simple and comprehensible it is.
References
Walczak, S. (2005). Organizational knowledge management structure. The Learning Organization, 12(4), 330-339. doi:10.1108/09696470510599118
