Financial professionals are frequently tasked with creating effective models that are accurate and dynamic. The power of a financial model comes from the ability to change the inputs and analyze the impact on outputs — factors that can benefit significantly from the greater data processing scale and deeper analytics offered by artificial intelligence (AI) tools such as Microsoft Copilot and ChatGPT.

This three-part course, offered in partnership with the Association for Financial Professionals (AFP), will equip finance practitioners in the foodservice equipment and supplies industry with the knowledge and skills needed to implement best practices for financial modeling, lead in analytics, harness AI technologies, and drive sustainable organizational change. Once they’ve mastered the tools and techniques, the course will guide participants on how to put their newfound expertise into action to build from-scratch financial models that produce baseline and dynamic outputs in response to changes in real-world scenarios.

Available at no cost to FEDA members. Individuals who participate in the live webinar may earn 2.4 CPE credits for each session.

Learning Objectives:
• Streamline workflows using modern Excel features to process and analyze financial data.
• Apply AI tools to generate formulas, debug models, and enhance productivity across financial planning and analysis tasks.
• Build advanced financial models incorporating sensitivity, scenario, optimization, and simulation techniques.
• Critically evaluate AI-driven recommendations within financial forecasting, planning, and performance management contexts.
• Design and present insights through interactive dashboards, PivotTables, and AI-assisted visualizations tailored to decision-makers.
• Automate and extend Excel using macros, AI-generated Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), and Python integration for large-scale financial analysis.
• Translate data and AI insights into actionable strategies that advance organizational goals and long-term value creation.

10:30 a.m. - 12:00 p.m., Oct. 29, 2025, Live Virtual Webinar

This course is designed for experienced finance professionals and has a strong focus on the application of finance data and insights to improve business performance. The webinar will discuss fundamentals of predictive analytics, regression models, fundamentals of AI (artificial intelligence) and ML (machine learning), key characteristics of ML models, supervised and unsupervised ML algorithms, ensemble models, and generative AI (ChatGPT/Gemini) and RAG models. The course will review a number of real-world case studies to help members explore how organizations use advanced analytics to achieve various business goals.

In this course, the Association for Finance Professionals will offer members practical knowledge and hands-on experience in using descriptive analytics to enhance data-driven decision-making. Participants will learn how financial data analytics can be applied to various business domains. The webinar will discuss types of financial data analytics, the basics of exploratory data analytics, data profiling with central tendency and variation techniques, associative descriptive analytics, and correlation techniques. The class will include multiple case study analyses of companies effectively using descriptive analytics to advance strategic objectives.

The Special Guest Presentation at the FEDA Executive Leadership Conference featured Kevin Warsh, monetary policy expert and Shepard Family distinguished visiting fellow in economics for the Hoover Institution. Warsh reflected on his work to help guide the United States out of the 2008 financial crisis and covered the lessons from that period that can be applied to the permacrises facing businesses today. As a former member of the Fed Board, he provided an analysis of the Fed’s current policies, particularly regarding inflation, and explained how the board’s actions are impacting businesses. Finally, he decoded what business leaders can expect in both the short and long term and laid out a roadmap for how companies can spur economic growth and foster stability amid turbulent financial markets.