This course offers a hands-on approach to understanding and managing costs effectively through MS Excel. Using real business data from a bakery, participants will learn how to build a customised costing template to calculate and interpret cost gaps. The course guides you through essential steps, including setting up cost sheets, calculating direct material, labour, and overhead costs, and applying conditional formatting to highlight cost variances. You'll also create visual representations with Excel's "bar of pie" chart to analyse cost structures in depth. Designed for accounting and finance professionals, this course provides practical Excel techniques for transforming raw data into meaningful insights that support strategic pricing decisions and cost control. By the end of this course, you'll have the tools and confidence to develop tailored costing models that meet specific business requirements. Perfect for anyone looking to enhance their costing skills with MS Excel, this course is an indispensable resource for finance teams aiming for cost optimisation and improved profitability.

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Upon completion of this course, learners will be able to:

• Learn how to organise, link, and process operational data to compute total and per-unit costs using Excel.
• Calculate the cost gap by comparing actual costs with target costs based on desired profit margins, and interpret the implications for pricing and cost control.
• Accurately allocate overheads using absorption rates and create effective visual aids like bar-of-pie charts to communicate cost structures.
• Master practical spreadsheet techniques including cell referencing, conditional formatting, and logic testing to build dynamic and informative cost models.