Budgeting & Driver-Based Planning

By the end of this course, you'll be able to design, document, and defend a credible, business-aligned budget — one that earns sign-off from leadership and genuine buy-in from the departments that have to deliver it. Most analysts inherit a budget process they've never redesigned. This course changes that. You'll map the end-to-end budget cycle stage by stage, diagnose where and why it stalls, and learn the workflow-design principles — stage-gates, entry and exit criteria, clear role assignments — that make it run faster. You'll move from static, line-item budgeting to driver-based planning: identifying the volume, price, headcount, and productivity levers that actually move the numbers, building them into transparent formulas, and running sensitivity tests that show how assumption changes ripple through revenue, cost, and margin. You'll also develop the business-alignment skills that make budgets stick — mapping departmental goals to measurable drivers, facilitating cross-functional reviews, and capturing agreed changes through traceable budget logs. No prior FP&A or coding experience required. This is Course 2 of the IBM FP&A Analyst with AI Skills Professional Certificate.