Financial Modeling & Analysis with AI
The CFO-Grade Decision Engine
Build three-statement models, scenario analyses, budgets and board-ready financial narratives, with AI as your always-on analyst. No finance degree required.
Who it is for: Managers, founders, analysts, and team leads who make money decisions and want CFO-grade modeling without the CFO price tag.
Created by
ZLearning Faculty
Instructor
ZLearning Faculty
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one-time · ≈ $3.13 per course day
- All 15 days, fully interactive
- Copy-paste prompt vaults in every day
- Auto-saved workbooks + download kits (PDF, Word)
- Knowledge quests with instant feedback
- Official certificate of completion
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Digital product, non-refundable once delivered, unless the course differs from this page. Refund policy
- Duration
- 15 days
- Learn
- 120 min/day
- Total time
- 30 hours
- Price
- $47 one-time
- Level
- Intermediate-friendly · Spreadsheet basics helpful
- Access
- Lifetime + certificate
Start free. Upgrade when you are convinced.
Try the complete first day with any account, then decide. No card, no trial timer, no pressure.
Free Introduction
The complete Day 1 experience, the same lesson paying students get, in your portal.
- Full Day 1, every section, interactive
- Real prompt vault + hands-on mission
- Workbook + knowledge quest with instant feedback
- Progress saved in your own portal
- Signup only, no payment details
Instant portal access after signup
Full Course
Every day of the 15-day journey, plus your official certificate.
- All 15 days, fully interactive
- Copy-paste prompt vaults in every day
- Auto-saved workbooks + download kits (PDF, Word)
- Official certificate of completion
- Lifetime access, one-time payment
Secure Stripe checkout · one-time · lifetime access
What You Will Learn
Concrete, job-ready outcomes, hover (or tap) any point to see exactly where and how it is practiced inside the course.
- Read and rebuild the three financial statements with confidence
Days 1-2, The Decision Ledger & T.R.U.S.T. Protocol
Tier every money call as Operating, Investing, or Financing, scored by Dollar Weight and tagged by blind spot, then install the five-pass validation (Tie-out, Reconcile, Unpack, Sense-check, Trace) that makes AI numbers defensible in any room.
ChatGPTClaude - Assemble the 3-Statement Flow Machine for any business or unit
Days 3-4, The P&L X-Ray & Working Capital Piston
Read any P&L in fifteen minutes across four layers, revenue quality, margin story, cost behavior, below the line, then compute your DSO/DIO/DPO cycle and the liquidity ladder that turns trapped cash into a number per day.
Microsoft Copilot (Excel)ChatGPT - Run base/bull/bear scenarios with the Scenario Triangle
Days 5-6, The Cash Wave & the Driver Tree
Build the lender-standard 13-week cash forecast from payment behavior with three pre-agreed warning lines, then wire P&L, balance sheet, and cash through 10-20 drivers so one assumption change ripples through all three statements.
Microsoft Copilot (Excel)Gemini - Build budgets, forecasts and cash-flow runways in spreadsheets + AI
Days 7-8, The Scenario Bowtie & Variance Autopsy
Generate Base, Bull, and Bear from one mechanism each with a ten-row stress grid, then decompose every monthly miss into Price, Volume, Mix, and Timing with mechanisms, owners, and two-sentence narratives.
ClaudeNotion AI - Price products and services with margin-aware models
Days 9-10, The 5-Dial Dashboard & the Rolling 13
Five dials, Growth, Margin, Cash, Return, Risk, each with a leading twin and data-derived thresholds, feeding a rolling 13-month forecast that grades its own misses and fixes one biased assumption per cycle.
ChatGPTGemini - Create the KPI Signal Board your leadership team actually reads
Days 11-12, Pricing Power Ladder & Investment Cases
Climb from cost-plus to value-based with elasticity breakevens and kill switches, then build one-page investment cases with payback, NPV-lite, a two-assumption sensitivity spine, and a pre-agreed review gate.
ChatGPTMicrosoft Copilot (Excel) - Turn models into decision memos executives approve quickly
Days 13-14, The Board-Ready Story & the Close Factory
Compress everything into three slides (What / Why / Now) and four consistent levels, then close the month in one day with AI exception-only reconciliation and a report factory that assembles every artifact from one dataset.
Notion AIZapier - Stress-test plans with sensitivity tables and break-even analysis
Day 15, The 90-Day Decision Engine
Wire all six systems into a rhythm, a 20-minute Weekly Cash Pulse, a one-day monthly close with autopsy and forecast roll, a half-day quarterly refresh, and defend your 90-day plan with your before-and-after measured in real numbers.
ChatGPTClaude
Inside the Course
The engine behind every single day, hover (or tap) any card to see exactly what is included.
15 Days × 120 Min
A complete guided journey, one focused session a day, fully interactive, zero fluff.
Copy-Paste Prompt Vault
A professional prompt vault in every day, copy, paste, get results. Prompts become your assets.
Fully Engaging Workbooks
Interactive in-app workbooks with auto-save, plus fillable PDF, Word and printable versions.
Real-World Missions
Every exercise uses your actual job context, not toy examples. Practice while you learn.
Progress That Shows Everything
A living dashboard tracks every section, quiz and workbook field, and flags what is missing.
Certificate of Completion
Finish the journey and graduate with an official ZLearning certificate for your resume and LinkedIn.
Day-by-Day: Key Highlights
Exactly what happens on each day of your 15-day journey, hover (or tap) any day to see the full detail. Each day blends interactive lessons, a prompt vault, hands-on missions on your real work, a workbook and a knowledge quest, days unlock in sequence.
Map Your Money Decisions
Day 1 · 120 min · 8 sections
- Build the Decision Ledger
- Tag weight and blind spots
Hover or tap for details
Map Your Money Decisions
- Build the Decision Ledger, Understand the three tiers of money decisions, Operating, Investing, Financing, and how every financial call you make belongs to exactly one tier with its own review rhythm.
- Tag weight and blind spots, Score every decision with a Dollar Weight (how much money it moves) and a Blind Spot note (what you cannot see today), the two tags that tell you where modeling effort pays.
- Meet your AI stack, Tour the seven tools this program trains on, ChatGPT, Claude, Microsoft Copilot (Excel), Gemini, Perplexity, Notion AI, and Zapier, and what each one does best with financial data.
- Bank a quick win, Run your first copy-paste prompt today, the Decision Ledger Auditor, and walk away with a baseline memo you can put in front of any CFO or investor.
The T.R.U.S.T. Protocol: AI Numbers You Can Defend
Day 2 · 120 min · 8 sections
- Install the five passes
- See a hallucination happen
Hover or tap for details
The T.R.U.S.T. Protocol: AI Numbers You Can Defend
- Install the five passes, Learn T.R.U.S.T., Tie-out, Reconcile, Unpack assumptions, Sense-check, Trace the source, and what each pass actually catches before it embarrasses you.
- See a hallucination happen, Watch a realistic AI finance conversation produce a plausible, wrong number, and catch it with the protocol in under two minutes.
- Build your validation habit, Wire the protocol into your daily flow so every AI analysis you run this course gets validated automatically, no willpower required.
- Validate your Day 1 ledger, Run the protocol against yesterday's Dollar Weight estimates and fix the two weakest numbers before they reach your memo.
The P&L X-Ray: Four Layers of Margin Truth
Day 3 · 120 min · 8 sections
- Master the four layers
- Detect revenue quality
Hover or tap for details
The P&L X-Ray: Four Layers of Margin Truth
- Master the four layers, Revenue quality, margin story, cost behavior, below the line, the fixed sequence analysts use to read any P&L in fifteen minutes instead of two hours.
- Detect revenue quality, Separate growth that compounds (repeat customers, recurring revenue) from growth that borrows (one-offs, price spikes, channel stuffing).
- Split fixed from variable, Classify every major cost line by its behavior when volume changes, the single classification that makes every later forecast and scenario honest.
- X-ray your own P&L, Run the full four-layer pass on your real numbers today with the prompt suite, and find the leak the summary was hiding.
The Working Capital Piston
Day 4 · 120 min · 8 sections
- Read the Piston
- Build the liquidity ladder
Hover or tap for details
The Working Capital Piston
- Read the Piston, Understand the Cash Conversion Cycle as a piston, DSO (how long customers hold your cash), DIO (how long inventory holds it), DPO (how long you hold suppliers' cash), and what each stroke costs you.
- Build the liquidity ladder, Rank your resources by how fast they become cash, from bank balance to unsellable stock, and compute your survival runway in months.
- See the counterparty game, Recognize working capital as a negotiation: every day of DSO you give away is a day of free financing you hand to customers; every day of DPO is financing they hand you.
- Find your trapped cash, Run the Piston Audit on your real AR, inventory, and AP data today, and identify the single dial worth the most dollars per day.
The Cash Wave: Your 13-Week Runway
Day 5 · 120 min · 8 sections
- Build the 13-week wave
- Master timing over amount
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The Cash Wave: Your 13-Week Runway
- Build the 13-week wave, Assemble receipts and disbursements week by week, opening balance, collections, payroll, suppliers, rent, tax, capex, and produce the chart lenders actually ask for.
- Master timing over amount, Internalize why timing errors, not amount errors, dominate forecast misses, and how the wave's timing columns catch them.
- Install the warning lights, Set three trigger lines, Minimum Cash, the Amber line, and the Red line, so the wave alarms before the bank balance does.
- Find your Cash Gap, Measure the days between paying suppliers and collecting customers on your real calendar, and see what that gap costs per week.
The Driver Tree: One Change Flows Everywhere
Day 6 · 120 min · 8 sections
- Think in drivers, not lines
- Wire the three statements
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The Driver Tree: One Change Flows Everywhere
- Think in drivers, not lines, Separate every financial line into driver (the cause you can set) or result (the effect you read), the single distinction that makes models maintainable.
- Wire the three statements, Connect P&L to balance sheet to cash with the five canonical links, net income to retained earnings, AR to receivables, COGS to inventory, capex to fixed assets, profit to cash.
- Build your model skeleton, Assemble a working driver-driven model of your own business, one tab of drivers, three linked statements, zero hardcoded results.
- Prove the ripple, Change one driver, days-to-pay, price, volume, and watch the ripple cross all three statements; the proof your wiring is real.
The Scenario Bowtie: Base, Bull, Bear
Day 7 · 120 min · 8 sections
- Generate the bowtie
- Apply the two-lever rule
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The Scenario Bowtie: Base, Bull, Bear
- Generate the bowtie, Produce Base, Bull, and Bear from the same driver set, with each scenario's assumptions written as a story a skeptic can audit.
- Apply the two-lever rule, Learn why scenarios that move ten drivers at once are fiction, and how moving only two levers keeps every case traceable to a real mechanism.
- Build the stress grid, Assemble the 10-question stress matrix, price, volume, cost, terms, capacity shocks crossed with your five master drivers.
- Name your break-glass number, Find the Bear-case cash trough and the date it happens, the two numbers that turn 'what if things go bad' into a plan.
The Variance Autopsy: Price, Volume, Mix, Timing
Day 8 · 120 min · 8 sections
- Master the four-gap split
- Run the autopsy ritual
Hover or tap for details
The Variance Autopsy: Price, Volume, Mix, Timing
- Master the four-gap split, Decompose any revenue or margin miss into Price, Volume, Mix, and Timing, the four causes every variance actually is.
- Run the autopsy ritual, Execute the fixed six-step sequence on a real month, data, split, mechanism, owner, action, narrative, in under 45 minutes.
- Write the variance narrative, Convert each material gap into two sentences: what happened, and what changes because of it, the format executives retain.
- Autopsy your last real month, Run the full sequence on your actuals vs plan today and leave with the one-page autopsy brief your leadership meeting was missing.
The 5-Dial Dashboard: Metrics Leadership Reads
Day 9 · 120 min · 8 sections
- Choose the five dials
- Pair leading with lagging
Hover or tap for details
The 5-Dial Dashboard: Metrics Leadership Reads
- Choose the five dials, Growth, Margin, Cash, Return, Risk, one dial per question leadership actually asks, and the discipline of leaving metrics off the page.
- Pair leading with lagging, Wire every lagging result to its leading twin, pipeline for revenue, quote-to-order for margin, AR behavior for cash, so the dial predicts, not just reports.
- Set thresholds that fire, Give each dial an amber and red threshold with a named response, a metric without a threshold is a screensaver, not a control.
- Assemble your one-pager, Build your real dashboard from your model's outputs today, five dials, thresholds, and the Friday note that writes itself.
The Rolling 13: Forecasts That Self-Correct
Day 10 · 120 min · 8 sections
- Understand rolling logic
- Grade your own misses
Hover or tap for details
The Rolling 13: Forecasts That Self-Correct
- Understand rolling logic, Why a constant horizon beats a fixed annual number, the rolling window adds a month at the back every time a month falls off the front, so the future never goes stale.
- Grade your own misses, Build the Forecast Error Scorecard, bias vs noise, per-driver accuracy, the instrument that tells you WHICH assumptions are bad, not just that the total was off.
- Wire the monthly loop, Connect the rolling forecast to your Day 8 autopsy and Day 6 model, one hour per month, assumptions updated where the autopsy found mechanisms, not where hope suggests.
- Run your first roll, Re-forecast your model today with your real recent actuals and produce the first scorecard entry, the moment your forecast starts learning.
The Pricing Power Ladder
Day 11 · 120 min · 8 sections
- Place yourself on the ladder
- Run the elasticity check
Hover or tap for details
The Pricing Power Ladder
- Place yourself on the ladder, Cost-plus → competitor-matched → value-based, the three rungs, the evidence each requires, and why most mid-market firms live two rungs below their leverage.
- Run the elasticity check, Estimate how volume really responds to price for each line, the sanity check that stops both cowardly underpricing and reckless increases.
- Read the PVM triangle, See the full consequence of a price move: margin gain, volume risk, and mix shift, all three corners, before you commit.
- Design your first price test, Pick one line, design a controlled price move with a pre-agreed kill switch, and compute its PVM math today.
The Investment Case Builder
Day 12 · 120 min · 8 sections
- Master the three numbers
- Build the sensitivity spine
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The Investment Case Builder
- Master the three numbers, Payback period, NPV-lite (discounted cash in plain English), and downside case, the trio every credible investment case carries, and what each answers.
- Build the sensitivity spine, Identify the two assumptions the case lives or dies on, and show the case at good/base/bad for each, the spine that turns hostile Q&A into a formality.
- Write the one-page memo, Assemble the ask, the return, the spine, and the pre-agreed review gate, the format decision-makers actually approve.
- Case a real investment, Build the full case on a live investment from your Decision Ledger today, numbers from your model, not from hope.
The Board-Ready Story: 3 Slides, 5 Minutes
Day 13 · 120 min · 8 sections
- Master the 3-slide structure
- Compress without lying
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The Board-Ready Story: 3 Slides, 5 Minutes
- Master the 3-slide structure, What / Why / Now, the fixed narrative spine that mirrors how executives actually decide, and why extra slides dilute rather than inform.
- Compress without lying, Use the Compression Ladder, page, paragraph, sentence, number, keeping every level consistent with the one above it, and audit-proof at every depth.
- Answer the room, Prepare the five questions your specific audience will ask, from the spine, not improvised, and rehearse the 30-second version until it is yours.
- Ship your real story, Build the 3-slide deck from your actual model outputs today and deliver the five-minute version to a real human before the day ends.
The Close Factory: Month-End in One Day
Day 14 · 120 min · 8 sections
- Design the close pipeline
- Run the reconciliation loop
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The Close Factory: Month-End in One Day
- Design the close pipeline, The five-station assembly line, data pull, reconcile, adjust, review, publish, with AI's role and yours defined at every station.
- Run the reconciliation loop, AI-matched transactions with exception-only review, the loop that turns line-by-line ticking into a fifteen-minute exceptions sweep.
- Build the report factory, One folder, one naming law, one assembly script, the X-Ray, wave update, autopsy, dashboard, and story generated from the same closed data.
- Cut your close day, Time your current close, install the factory pieces, and ship this month's close with a measured hour count, the before/after starts now.
Assemble Your Decision Engine
Day 15 · 120 min · 8 sections
- Assemble the engine
- Install the 90-day calendar
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Assemble Your Decision Engine
- Assemble the engine, Wire the six systems, Ledger, T.R.U.S.T., X-Ray, Piston+Wave, Model+Scenarios, Factory, into one operating rhythm with owners and dates.
- Install the 90-day calendar, Weekly Pulse, Monthly Autopsy and roll, Quarterly Refresh and bowtie re-run, scheduled with named owners, including who covers you.
- Measure the delta, Re-run the Day 1 baseline, decision ledger, cycle days, runway, close hours, and compute your before-and-after in real numbers.
- Defend the plan, State your 90-day plan, the three levers, the investment case gate, the close target, out loud to a real person, capstone style.
Frequently Asked Questions
Tools you will master
ZLearning Faculty
ZLearning faculty, every journey is built on real corporate workflows: reports, pipelines, decks and decisions, not theory.
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