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Renewables model charts sheet, Financial Modelling

Download F1F9’s example renewables development model here

We are delighted to invite you to download this renewables development model. (And if you haven't already seen our original example model, you may be interested in that one as well.)

We’re sharing it with you to demonstrate our approach to building financial models, which...

Corporate budgeting in Excel - how we do it at F1F9

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Corporate budgeting: understanding the complexities

The budgeting process is often criticised for being time-consuming, adding far too little value and being out of date before the printer ink is dry. Arguments are also made against forecasting: either the outturn result is known (in which case why bother forecasting in the first place?) or the...

Build, Support, Training

Five things the Corporate Finance modeller needs to master

A basic mastery of financial modelling focuses on the presentation of three financial statements: Income Statement; Balance Sheet; and Cash Flow. A good model will be dynamic, capable of running sensitivities and introducing scenarios. Bump up the price and watch the cash flows rise. Financial...

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Five reasons to outsource financial model maintenance

We work with plenty of clients on building data-heavy enterprise models to meet their needs. The models include functionality to accommodate actual financial figures, budgets and forecasts. A recent example is a large business model with five subsidiaries. It has the ability to store budget copies...

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Using F11 quick charts

Most financial modellers create graphs to visualise data or to check trends. While building finance models, a good modeller will keep asking themselves whether their results are looking sensible. A good financial modeller will regularly chart line items and analyse the resulting trends - even while...

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12 commonly used functions every financial modeller should know

That’s because, when it comes to formulas, we aim for simplicity and readability. Complex functions with poor audit trails (I’m thinking of OFFSET, for example) are less useful when your primary objective is transparency. Here are 12 functions that we use again and again in financial...

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Time to call in the financial modelling experts?

Why take a driving test if you have no intention of ever driving a car? Answer: you wanted to acquire the knowledge, skills and experience to confirm that this activity wasn’t for you. The more informed you are, the more likely you are to make sensible decisions. At F1F9 , we have been...

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Put out more flags

Every forecast model we build in F1F9 has a Time sheet: a worksheet dedicated to important dates e.g. when the model starts, when the model ends, when the project starts, when the project ends, when the project moves from one phase to another. The Time sheet is a foundation sheet: bringing together...

Incorporating actuals in a financial model

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Adding actuals to a financial model

We had a great question from one of our financial modelling online course subscribers are asking about the design of financial models with historical data at their heart, a.k.a. "actuals". “This is the bit I find daunting: when you start an assignment, you don’t always have a set of...

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Modelling best practice – actions speak louder than words

There’s no shortage of blogs, articles and opinion pieces on how we should go about building a financial model, but they only really scratch the surface and need some imagination to go from principles to practicality. That’s why we’ve put together an example model to share with anyone who’s interested in taking a look.

Build, Review, Support, Training

F1F9: a local presence in Dubai, GCC and beyond

We are pleased to confirm our presence in the Gulf with a team based in Dubai. Our full range of services will be available across the region: training, model build, and model review / risk management. The Dubai office will be led by Omar Shaker who has recently joined our senior team.

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Deliverable Management Information Systems

Why did substantive changes to the MS Excel spreadsheet end 20 years ago? Not even a simple tweak to the LOOKUP function to allow exact-match with a FALSE argument? That on its own would unify a batch of sub-optimal approaches available through all the alternatives, with INDEX/MATCH combinations...

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Charting new territories with FAST

In my experience making a good model requires you to spend time not modelling, but talking about it instead. With my immediate team, I can talk in front of the monitor with the model on it. But other project members do not talk in columns and rows; they prefer to talk with pictures. Pictures mean...