Portfolio
Applied
Work
A selection of seminar cases and structured exercises in financial forecasting and budget planning — built around real planning scenarios, not hypothetical frameworks.
Case studies
Seminar exercises built around budget planning challenges
Rolling 12-Month Forecast for a Mid-Size Retail Business
Participants worked through a structured exercise where a retail operation had significant seasonal revenue swings but fixed overhead commitments. The task was to build a rolling forecast model that accounts for inventory cycles, supplier payment terms, and a $180,000 credit facility. Groups compared two approaches — driver-based forecasting versus line-item extrapolation — and evaluated the accuracy trade-offs of each.
Departmental Budget Allocation Under Constrained Resources
A manufacturing scenario where three departments submitted budget requests totalling 34% above the approved ceiling. Seminar groups worked through prioritisation frameworks including zero-based budgeting and incremental adjustments. The exercise surfaced common friction points: capital expense versus operational classification, mid-year reallocation requests, and how to structure variance reporting that finance and operations can both read without confusion.
Cash Flow Projection for a Service Business with Delayed Invoicing
Professional services firms frequently carry receivables that create a gap between earned revenue and available cash. This case used a consulting agency with net-45 client terms and a staff payroll due every two weeks. Participants built a 90-day cash flow projection, identified the two weeks of highest exposure, and modelled options including invoice factoring and a line-of-credit draw schedule. The discussion centred on when to treat the gap as temporary versus structural.
About these exercises
All cases are based on plausible planning situations, not actual client data. Numbers are constructed to reflect realistic scale without referencing any specific organization.
Participant feedback
What attendees worked through and took away
These are honest accounts from participants at different experience levels. Financial planning is not a skill that clicks immediately — most described a gradual shift in how they approach numbers rather than a single moment of clarity.
Teodor Vansca
Operations Manager, BC
The retail forecasting case took me several sessions to feel comfortable with. Once I saw how the inventory cycle affected cash timing, I started applying the same logic to our own quarterly planning. It's not a quick fix — it's a different way of reading the numbers.
Marta Pelikánová
Finance Lead, Vancouver
The departmental budget exercise was genuinely difficult — in a useful way. Working through the prioritisation frameworks with people from different industries made me question some assumptions I'd treated as standard. The variance reporting discussion alone was worth the time.