After we took a look at investments in a company, focusing on CAPEX expenditure (PPE, Intangibles etc.), with the business cases we expand the horizons.

The forward thinking (or planning) in performance management of a company can have a broad scope (usually in form of budgets or forecasts) but also narrower scopes (business cases). We use business cases for a multitude of initiatives such as launching a new product, a promotion campaign, adding a new brand or a new category to our portfolio, introducing a new sales channel, entering a new geographical market and much more. Even when we evaluate an investment we are essentially also building a business case.

From format point of view, we can use one of the two financial statements already known, the P&L or the Cash Flow. Each comes, of course, with advantages and drawbacks and one form or the other might be better suited, based on the specifics of your case.

The course also goes beyond presenting some mere numbers, touching topics such as business partnering, influencing decision making and challenging the case owners. And it also focuses on some very technical aspects such as time horizons, uncertainties, multiple scenarios, sensitivity analysis and hyper-competitive markets.

Last but not least you have a few numeric examples which can show you for project comparisons, in some specific cases, it is better to use one format (financial statement) than the other one.