Six lanes on the workshop floor, one shared method.
Every lane below runs on the same Observe · Practice · Plan · Prove method, using genuine budgeting, cash-flow and reporting tasks. Book a single lane or move across the floor in sequence. All fees are quoted in Canadian dollars and cover materials, bench time and a facilitator-reviewed artefact.
Pick a lane by task, not by title.
Lanes are named after the finance task they rehearse, not a job title, because the skills transfer across roles — bookkeeper, operations coordinator, small-business owner, freelancer. Most people start at Lane 1 or Lane 2. Lanes 3 through 5 assume you can already build a basic budget and read a cash-flow sheet. The Wealth Capstone is open once you have completed any two lanes.
Each session seats a maximum of ten learners per bench pair, so a facilitator can correct prompting and categorisation logic in real time rather than after the fact.
Budgeting Foundations
An entry lane for anyone who has never built a working budget from a blank sheet. You will construct a household or small-team budget line by line, learn where AI drafting genuinely saves time and where it invents numbers that need catching, and leave with a template you can reuse on your own finances. The session closes with a short written plan explaining every assumption you made — the artefact a facilitator checks before you're marked complete.
Cash Flow Practice Drills
Cash flow is where most budgets quietly fail, so this lane drills the forecast until it holds under pressure. You will build a rolling twelve-week cash-flow forecast, then run three stress scenarios — a late invoice, a slow month and an unplanned expense — rebuilding the forecast each time under a timer. By the third pass, most learners stop hiding weak assumptions in rounding errors. You leave with a forecast template and a one-page contingency note.
AI Planning Tools Lab
A focused lab on prompting AI tools for finance work without losing accuracy along the way. You will drill prompt patterns for ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and Claude across three tasks: summarising a messy transaction export, drafting a plain-language budget narrative, and checking a forecast for arithmetic drift. Every AI draft gets a hand-verification pass, because the lab's real subject is judgement — knowing which outputs to trust, which to rewrite and which to discard entirely.
Expense Systems Clinic
Bring your own receipts folder, inbox export or expense chaos — this clinic is built around real, messy source material. You will design a categorisation system by hand first, then test whether an AI tool can hold that same structure consistently across a second batch of transactions. Most learners arrive with months of backlog and leave with both a cleared batch and a repeatable system for the next one, plus a short audit-ready summary sheet.
Plan Presentation Drills
A plan that only lives on a spreadsheet rarely convinces anyone. This lane drills the spoken half of finance work — explaining a budget, a forecast or an expense decision to a sceptical stakeholder in plain language, under mild time pressure, in front of peers who ask real follow-up questions. You will rewrite your explanation twice, use AI tools to tighten wording between rounds, and finish with a script you can actually reuse at work.
Wealth Capstone
The Wealth Capstone strings every earlier lane into one applied project: a full financial plan for a fictional household or small business, built from budget through cash-flow forecast through expense system through a presented recommendation. You will use AI tools throughout, exactly as you would on the job, and defend every material choice to a facilitator panel. Graduates leave with a complete portfolio proof artefact suitable for a job application or a client pitch.
Most people run two or three lanes across a season.
A typical route through the floor is Lane 1, then Lane 2 or Lane 4 depending on which task shows up most at work, then the AI Planning Tools Lab once the fundamentals feel steady. The Wealth Capstone works best a few weeks after your second lane, once you have had a chance to use the material on your own numbers and come back with questions.
Talk through a route