Finance training for non-financial professionals: Brussels and Luxembourg

Who is this training for?

This training is designed for SME executives, managers and team or business unit leaders who make decisions with financial impact without a prior finance background. No prerequisites are required: the programme starts from the fundamentals and builds on concrete business situations.

What our participants have in common is not their job title but their situation: they commit company money without ever having been given the keys to discuss it on equal terms with a CFO, a banker or a board of directors.

• SME executives who arbitrate investment and financing decisions on their own.
• Managers and business unit leaders who need to build and defend a budget.
• Sales, operations or HR profiles who deal with the finance department.
• Buyers of businesses and board members who want to read annual accounts without an intermediary.

What you will be able to do

By the end of the training, you can read a balance sheet and an income statement without outside help, you distinguish accounting profit from actual cash, and you defend a budget with quantified assumptions rather than gut feeling.

• Read a balance sheet and an income statement: structure, key items, orders of magnitude.
• Distinguish profit from cash: understand why a profitable company can run out of liquidity.
• Manage margin and working capital: identify where money is created and where it gets tied up.
• Build and defend an annual budget: volume, price and cost assumptions.
• Talk to your CFO, your banker or your board with the right vocabulary.

Trainers who are both professors and practitioners

Sagora programmes are taught by professors from the Solvay Brussels School (ULB) and corporate finance practitioners. This dual background guarantees rigorous content, illustrated with real-life situations rather than textbook examples.

Sagora has been training executives and managers since 2006. Participants rate our training 5/5 on Google. The teaching approach favours concrete cases: you work on real company accounts, not abstractions.

Programme, formats and next step

The reference programme for a non-financial audience is Finance for managers, Part A: financial diagnosis, planning and steering, i.e. 7 days split into three blocks (3+2+2). Dates and prices for open-enrolment sessions are published on the programme page; in-company formats are built on request.

If you are hesitating between programmes, our course finder recommends a path in three questions. And if the need concerns a whole team, an in-company session at your premises allows the case studies to be adapted to your sector.