working capital management | liquidity | treasury | operating cycle | financial forecasting | budgeting for managers
What You Will Learn:
- Build a rolling 13-week cash forecast and spot the week the money runs short before it does
- Calculate your cash conversion cycle and shorten it through receivables, inventory and payables
- Close a cash gap using factoring, invoice discounting, inventory financing or leasing
- Set up a monthly financial control rhythm that catches problems while they are still cheap
- Decide between debt and equity funding, and know what a credit rating does to your cost of money
- Find where the business leaks cash: bottlenecks, queues, downtime and duplicated work
- Run a cost-reduction programme in a downturn without destroying the team you will need afterwards
- Learn alongside 1.6 million Mike Pritula students from 185 countries
- Get the experience of an instructor who built finance and operations systems at Preply, Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank
- Build a board-ready working capital plan that links forecasts, funding and operations
Overview: Beyond the Theoretical Ledger
I’ve spent a decade in the tech ecosystem, and if there is one thing that keeps founders and finance directors awake at 3:00 AM, it’s not the lack of “vision”—it’s the terrifying realization that the bank account is draining faster than the invoices are being paid. Mike Pritula’s course, Working Capital Management: Liquidity & Forecasting, is a punchy, no-nonsense deep dive into the plumbing of corporate finance. While most courses treat liquidity as an abstract accounting concept, Pritula approaches it like a high-stakes game of survival, which, in the current high-interest-rate environment, it absolutely is.
What I appreciated most was the shift away from “static” accounting. This isn’t about looking at what happened last quarter; it’s about looking three months into the future. The centerpiece is the rolling 13-week cash forecast. In my experience, this is the gold standard for real-world projects in distressed companies or high-growth startups. It’s the difference between having a “oops” moment in a board meeting and being the person who secured a debt funding facility three weeks before the gap hit. Pritula draws from his time at heavy hitters like Preply and Wargaming, and you can feel that “in-the-trenches” grit throughout the modules. He doesn’t just tell you to “manage inventory”; he explains how inventory financing and factoring can be used as strategic levers to unlock growth without diluting equity.
Prerequisites
To get the most out of this, you shouldn’t be walking in totally cold. While it’s marketed as beginner to advanced, a baseline understanding of a Balance Sheet and a P&L statement is essential. You don’t need to be a CPA, but you should know your way around an industry-standard tool like Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets. If you don’t know the difference between “Accounts Receivable” and “Revenue,” you might find the pace a bit jarring. This is for the professional who has seen a spreadsheet before and is ready to turn those cells into a job-ready skills arsenal.
Skills & Tools
The curriculum is built around hands-on labs where you actually build the models. You’ll walk away with:
- Cash Conversion Cycle (CCC) Optimization: Techniques to squeeze blood from a stone by shortening the gap between paying suppliers and getting paid by customers.
- 13-Week Rolling Forecasts: A dynamic modeling approach that is the backbone of modern treasury management.
- Cost-Reduction Strategy: Learning how to cut the fat without cutting the muscle—essential for career growth in volatile markets.
- Financial Control Rhythms: Setting up a monthly cadence that catches “cheap” problems before they become “company-ending” disasters.
- Funding Evaluation: A framework for deciding between equity funding and various forms of debt, including invoice discounting.
Career Benefits & Job Roles
This course is a massive booster for anyone eyeing a CFO track or a Director of Operations role. In the tech world, we often over-index on “growth” and under-index on “efficiency.” Adding “Working Capital Management” to your LinkedIn profile signals that you understand the bottom line. It’s excellent certification prep for those looking to move into FP&A (Financial Planning & Analysis) or Corporate Treasury. If you are a founder, this is arguably more important than a pitch deck course because it ensures you actually stay in business long enough to hit your milestones. Job roles that benefit most include Finance Managers, Operations Leads, and even Senior Project Managers who need to manage budgeting for managers on a granular level.
Pros
- Operational Context: Unlike most finance instructors, Pritula has built these systems at scale in tech-first environments like Preply. This isn’t academic fluff; it’s operational reality.
- Actionable Templates: The focus on board-ready plans means you aren’t just learning theory; you’re building assets you can literally take into your next executive meeting.
- Psychological Edge: I loved the section on cost-reduction without destroying team morale. Most finance courses ignore the “human” element of a downturn, but this one addresses it head-on.
- Global Perspective: With 1.6 million students in the ecosystem, the networking potential and the universality of the methods are top-tier.
Cons
The only real drawback is the pacing for non-finance pros. If you are coming from a strictly creative or HR background, the technicality of the financial forecasting modules might require you to hit the pause button and do some outside reading on basic liquidity ratios. It’s an “honest take” review, so I’ll say it: the UI of some of the provided templates feels a bit “legacy,” but the logic behind them is bulletproof. I would have loved to see more integration with modern automated ERP tools, but mastering the logic in Excel first is probably better for long-term skill retention.