Teaching Forecasting, Cash Budgeting And Inventory Model, Building Using SBTools

Abstract

Students, entrepreneurs and small business owners have need to efficiently and effectively develop forecasting, cash budgeting, and inventory building and control models for business planning, whether for classroom or business development purposes. Efficiently being able to create different financial alternatives will not necessarily yield more effective planning results, but does allow for “easier exploration of business options. While no proof’ is at hand to indicate the teaching or learning effectiveness of such exploration, intuitively, additional modeling of the options may lead to more effective decision making. Lotus 1-2-3m, has created an opportunity to develop easy to use templates. A financial template was developed to allow for more efficient modeling of cash budgeting, forecasting and inventory building and control. The computer based instruction aspects of the template involve the potential learning which occurs by shifting the burden of calculation from the planner to the computer. This paper describes the use of SBTools ™ as a computer based instruction tool.