520 Managing Finance

Unit Overview

520 Managing Finance is a unit within the CMI Level 5 module that improves the ability of leaders to effectively handle the financial resources within the workplace. The organisation has a responsibility to ensure that it fulfills its financial obligations to stakeholders. This involves ensuring that it is productive in terms of profitability and revenue. To achieve the de financial obligations. The leaders must ensure that the financial resources within the workplace are utilised effectively and efficiently to achieve the desired levels of financial performance.

The leaders are required to understand the principles of budgeting, forecasting, and financial analysis to ensure that they can balance the financial goals and objectives with the need for providing financial resources for tasks and responsibilities within the workplace. The leaders need to be able to have an understanding of the various principles and theoretical approaches that they can use in making managerial decisions within the workplace, which involve handling financial resources and making contributions towards meeting the financial goals and objectives of the organisation. 

520 Managing Finance is, therefore, an important unit that prepares leaders to handle financial obligations and assign resources within the workplace. The leaders are trained on approaches to devising decision-making from the managerial levels within the workplace, which involves the process of creating the potential of the individuals within the workplace. The main aim and purpose of the unit are to ensure that the learner has an understanding of the principles and approaches within the organisation that are aimed at ensuring that the leaders can fulfill their financial duties within the workplace, which contribute towards meeting the organisational goals and objectives. The unit is taught in 22 hours of guided learning and contributes towards 6 credit values towards the completion of the CMI module.

Suitability of the Unit

Stakeholders within different areas of practice must be able to effectively handle their financial resources. The leaders must ensure that they are able to identify the organisational policies and procedures within the workplace, which involve being able to effectively handle the financial resources to ensure that they accomplish their goals and objectives. The leaders should also understand the need to ensure that the organisation is able to achieve the set tasks and responsibilities and meet expected standards by ensuring that they utilise the financial resources assigned to their areas of responsibility effectively.

This makes 520 Managing Finance a suitable unit to prepare the leaders for handling the different roles and duties within the workplace, which ensures that they are able to fulfill the obligations of the organisation to stakeholders by ensuring it meets the profitability and revenue standards set for them as well as achieve desired goals and objectives using the limited financial resources. The unit is designed for the middle managers within the organisation.

However, it can also be designed to improve the ability of the senior managers and junior managers to work effectively in the different areas of responsibility and ensure that they are able to meet their obligations by working with the provided budgets. It can also be used to ensure the employees understand the financial issues within the workplace and prepare them for leadership.

Learning Outcomes

Upon completion of the unit, the learners should be able to:

• evaluate the relationship between the financial function and other functional areas of the organisation

• Identify the impact of financial objectives and decision-making on the organisations

• Differentiate between management accounting and financial accounting

• Understand the impact of organisational and regulatory requirements and frameworks on the process of financial management

• Understand the challenges that face the organisation in accessing finance and the strategies that can be established by the leaders to overcome these challenges

• Differentiate between budget setting and financial forecasting within the organisation

• Evaluate the approaches used to set budgets within the organisation

• Formulate and justify a budget in your area of management responsibility

• Understand the corrective actions that can be implemented to address budgetary variances that could arise in the process of implementing a budget

• Explain the reporting procedures for authorising corrective actions when handling a budget variance to ensure that it does not compromise the performance of the team or organisation

Key Learning Areas

This unit focuses on improving the capabilities of the leader to develop and implement a budget effectively. The unit provides critical principles that include being able to budget effectively and forecast the financial obligations of the organisation. The unit covers critical areas of learning that include:

Understanding the Concept of Budgeting within the Organisation Settings

this area of learning contributes towards meeting the goals and objectives of the organisation in achieving specific tasks and responsibilities within the workplace. The learners are guided to understand the principles of budgeting and the benefits of budgeting within the organisation. It helps to understand the regulatory and legal frameworks that are associated with the process of budgeting to ensure that the leaders can develop effective and inclusive budgets. It also presents the learners with information that includes the role of corporate governance in improving the budgeting process in the organisation.

Setting and Managing Budgets

This area of learning helps improve the ability of the leaders to effectively address the financial resourcing of the organisation. This area of learning helps the learners to understand the differences between the financial forecasting process and budget setting, which are critical components of sound financial management. Learners are also introduced to the different factors such as technology, increasing competition, government regulations, and the organisational factors that could affect the process of budgeting within the workplace. They are also guided to understand principles that revolve around building the capabilities of the leaders to effectively identify the sources of financial resources and the various factors that revolve around impacting the performance of the organisation. This area of learning also provides an opportunity for leaders to establish effective practices and strategies to identify variances that include overspending within the budget and employing corrective action to these issues.

Evaluation

On completing the unit, the learners are required to complete an assessment. The evaluation includes a written assessment that aims at understanding the theoretical and practical mastery of content within the workplace. It also helps the assessors to understand the accomplishment of learning objectives.