Master Capital Budgeting Through Real Business Decisions

Learn to evaluate investment projects using NPV, IRR, and payback methods. Our autumn 2025 program walks you through actual case studies where companies made critical capital allocation choices.

Explore Our Approach

Financial analysis workspace with budgeting tools and documents

Why Capital Budgeting Decisions Matter

Most finance courses teach formulas. We start with the messy reality of how businesses actually decide where to put their money.

Manufacturing Expansion

A Sydney-based manufacturer needed to choose between upgrading existing equipment or opening a second facility. We'll walk through how they evaluated cash flows over seven years, factored in uncertainty, and made their final call.

You'll work with the same spreadsheets their finance team used.

Technology Investment Analysis

When a retail chain considered automating their inventory system, they had three competing proposals. Learn how sensitivity analysis revealed which option actually made sense given their growth projections and risk tolerance.

This case shows why IRR alone doesn't tell the whole story.

Comparing Mutually Exclusive Projects

Sometimes you can't do both. We examine how a transport company evaluated two different fleet upgrade strategies with different timelines and capital requirements. The cheaper option wasn't necessarily better once they ran the numbers properly.

Your Learning Journey Starting October 2025

Foundation Phase

We begin with time value of money concepts, but immediately apply them to real project evaluations. You'll build discounted cash flow models from scratch rather than relying on black-box calculators.

Decision Criteria Deep Dive

Each evaluation method has strengths and blind spots. Through case comparisons, you'll understand when NPV gives different answers than IRR, and why payback period still matters despite its limitations.

Risk and Uncertainty

Perfect forecasts don't exist. This segment covers scenario analysis, break-even calculations, and how companies adjust discount rates for riskier projects. We use actual historical data to show where forecasts went wrong.

Strategic Considerations

Numbers matter, but so does strategic fit. You'll examine cases where companies chose projects with lower NPV for valid business reasons, and learn to recognize when quantitative analysis needs qualitative context.

Collaborative financial planning session with budget analysis

How We Structure the Learning Experience

Our sessions mix short explanations with hands-on work. You'll spend more time building models and debugging assumptions than listening to lectures.

Each week focuses on one decision method with three different industry applications
You'll receive actual company data sets that need cleaning and interpretation
Small group discussions where you defend your investment recommendations
Office hours for working through calculation challenges and model errors

See Learning Resources

Learning From Practice

Perspective from someone who's evaluated these decisions professionally

Tamsin Jevremović

Capital Budgeting Instructor

I spent eight years doing financial analysis for infrastructure projects before moving into education. The gap between textbook examples and messy reality was always frustrating. Cash flow projections change. Discount rates get debated. Project timelines shift.

This program uses sanitized versions of analyses I actually worked on. When we discuss sensitivity testing, you'll see why I once had to recalculate an entire project NPV because our construction cost estimates were off by 18%. That's the kind of thing that makes the concepts stick better than theoretical problems.

You won't finish this course thinking capital budgeting is simple. But you'll understand how to approach these decisions systematically, even when the data is incomplete or assumptions are uncertain.

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