Capital proposals fail review for reasons that have nothing to do with arithmetic. This course builds the three artefacts a financial analyst is expected to defend in front of an investment committee, and the verification habits that make them defensible. You will use Copilot in Excel to construct a five-year incremental cash-flow schedule and automate NPV, IRR, and payback as live formulas — then independently spot-check every figure. You will read a two-way sensitivity table over WACC, volume, and cost overrun, and argue which variable the committee should actually spend its time on. And you will consolidate risk submissions from operations, IT, and ESG into a single scored register with owners, triggers, and mitigations, condensed into a one-page decision-ready summary. Throughout, the emphasis is on the boundary between what an AI assistant can build for you and what remains your judgement to make.

By the end of this course, you will be able to: - Apply Copilot prompts to construct project cash-flow schedules and automate NPV, IRR, and payback computations for capital expenditure proposals. - Analyze Copilot-generated sensitivity tables for variables such as WACC, volume, and cost overruns to assess their impact on investment returns. - Create an integrated risk register in Copilot that consolidates cross-departmental qualitative risks and proposed mitigations into a decision-ready summary. • Working fluency in Excel: formulas, absolute and relative references, and the ability to trace a calculation back through its inputs. • Familiarity with the time value of money and discounting. Learners should recognise a discount rate and understand why a cash flow five years out is worth less than the same amount today. • Exposure to a corporate investment approval process — a business case, an approval threshold, or a capital committee — in any industry. • Access to Microsoft 365 Copilot in Excel is assumed for the hands-on items. Learners without a licence can complete every activity using the supplied synthetic data and their own spreadsheet tooling; the graded assessment does not depend on tool access.