Corporate Financial Modeling
The extended curriculum: seven steps that take you from any historical financial information to a financial model you control — its fundamentals, its mechanics, its dynamics.
Master the model, whatever lands on your desk.
Financial models rarely fail on arithmetic. They fail structurally: numbers that trace to nothing, links nobody can find, drivers tangled up with calculations. Session 01 installs the discipline that prevents that — on any input, in any format.
You will be able to confidently start a financial model from scratch, or pick up another person's template, using financial information of any shape and size as the input: audited IFRS statements one day, management accounts the next, a financial due diligence report or a third-party template the day after. The same seven steps apply to all of them, because the steps operate on the structure of the information, not on its packaging.
That control is what saves hours of suffering. No more floundering around a workbook you half understand, no more panicking with every modification someone asks you to incorporate — because every figure in your model either traces back to a source, follows from a mapped relationship, or rests on a driver you chose and can defend. When a change arrives, you know exactly where it lands.
Seven steps, one integrated model.
Each step builds directly on the previous one, in the order the work actually happens. By the end, the forecast is not a separate spreadsheet bolted onto the history — it is the same machine, rolled forward.
Gather all the historical financial information you have — audited financial statements, management accounts, financial due diligence reports, public filings, third-party reports — and put it on a single spreadsheet, in its own raw layer.
The point is consolidation without transformation: every source, every period, every currency and every restatement laid out side by side, so the model starts from the complete record rather than from the one PDF that happened to be on top.
Find the relationships between the accounts across the financial statements and their notes — and across the detailed sections of the due diligence report where one exists: how revenue drives receivables, how payables follow purchases, how depreciation feeds the income statement, the balance sheet and the cash flow statement at once.
These links, not the line items, are the actual model. A number that cannot be traced through them is a number you cannot defend.
Everything in the financial statements that is not dependent on any other account — in the statements themselves, their notes, or the detailed DD sections — is a driver: volumes, prices, wage inflation, capex phasing, collection days. Everything else is a calculation.
Drivers are the only place where assumptions live. Keeping that boundary clean is what lets a model absorb new information without breaking, and what separates a model you control from one that controls you.
With relationships and drivers designed across all historical periods, the model assembles itself into the forecast: the same mechanics roll forward period by period, drivers take the assumptions, and the integrated model extends into the future with the identical architecture as the history it was built from.
Because the forecast is the history's machinery in motion, it stays auditable — every projected figure still traces to a source, a relationship or a driver.
Construct the set of indicators that supports decisions about the company, from five complementary families: performance KPIs for how the business is doing, operating KPIs for how it runs, credit KPIs for how it services its debt, equity KPIs for what the owner earns, and valuation KPIs for what the business is worth.
KPIs are designed, not discovered: each one exists to answer a specific question a specific decision-maker will ask.
Sensitivity analysis reads how the KPIs change as each driver moves, one at a time — it answers which assumptions actually matter. Scenario analysis reads how the KPIs behave under a specific, predetermined set of values for the assumptions — it answers what a named future looks like.
Run together, they turn the model from a description into an instrument: you know where the leverage sits before anyone asks.
Introduce corporate strategic actions, and read how the KPIs behave when a specific action is executed under specific scenarios — the deal layer, evaluated with the same machinery rather than a parallel spreadsheet.
In leveraged finance, the actions that matter most are LBOs, add-on acquisitions, refinancings, dividend recapitalizations and asset sales. Step 07 is where each of them stops being a slide and becomes a set of numbers you can interrogate.
The session closes with the applied layer: how AI models are used right in finance, at each of the seven steps — extracting and structuring historical information from documents, drafting account mappings, proposing driver candidates, sanity-checking KPI designs and generating scenario narratives. Used with discipline, AI compresses the mechanical hours; the modeling judgment stays yours. Education and analytics only — not investment advice.
September or October cohort, your choice. Every session runs 6-9 PM Madrid, 12-3 PM New York, and is recorded for every other time zone.
€400 founding cohort · full refund if it's not for you after session 1.
A framework, not a template.
The seven steps are the same every time, so a blank workbook has a known first move: consolidate, then map, then drive. The order does the thinking.
Run the seven steps in reverse on someone else's model and its structure reveals itself: which cells are links, which are drivers, which are neither and should not be trusted.
When a new assumption, a new scenario or a strategic action arrives, it has exactly one place to land. Hours of rework become minutes of targeted change.
Each figure traces to a source, a mapped relationship or an owned driver — the posture that holds up with a credit committee, a sponsor or your own management.
Session 01 is the first of four live sessions in Fusing Leveraged Finance and Option Pricing — the masterclass continues into covenant engineering, the full leveraged-finance model and origination. See the full four-session curriculum