Managerial accounting

• Coursera:
  • Managerial Accounting: Cost Behaviors, Systems, and Analysis
  • Managerial Accounting: Tools for Facilitating and Guiding Business Decisions
• Illinois Catalog ACCY 503 Managerial Accounting
• Offered in Fall Term (Aug-Oct)

This course is part of the Value Chain Management

Course Description

Managerial accounting is concerned with the internal generation, communication, and interpretation of information for both operational and strategic decision-making purposes.  Note that this definition and this course both focus on information internal to the firm.  We will not be directly concerned here with published or external financial statements or the impact of accounting information in the broader marketplace.

There are two important roles of managerial accounting information.  First, managerial accounting has a decision-facilitating role, as it allows decision-makers within the company to adjust their beliefs, and thus affects their evaluations of and decisions surrounding the company’s strategies and operations.  Second, managerial accounting has a decision-influencing role, as it can be used to evaluate performance and align the incentives of the decision-maker with those of other stakeholders.  This course will explore both the decision-facilitating and decision-influencing roles of managerial accounting.

This course differs from traditional introductory courses in managerial accounting in three ways. One, the subject content is more contemporary than traditional introductory managerial accounting courses. This means there will be less emphasis on traditional accounting techniques and double-entry bookkeeping and more emphasis on modern cost management and performance measurement techniques. Two, while we will learn analytical tools, the content will tend to be less procedural (e.g., “put this number in the numerator, this number in the denominator, etc.”), and more challenging than what you might find in traditional managerial accounting courses. Ultimately, we are going to focus both on the analytic tools and their implications and limitations. Three, this course will integrate practical issues directly into class discussions. This will be achieved through review of cases that are mainly based on real world managerial accounting contexts.

Instructor

Course Goals and Objectives

• Identify, understand, and discuss the nature, purpose, and importance of different types of decision-useful managerial accounting information.
• Identify, understand, and apply fundamental analytic/quantitative tools and techniques used to generate decision-useful managerial accounting information, while exhibiting an understanding of the tools’ and techniques’ implications and limitations.
• Make informed strategic and operational business decisions based on your development and/or evaluation of supporting managerial accounting information.

Topics of this course

• Module 1: Introduction to Managerial Accounting and Cost Concepts
• Module 2: Costing Systems 1
• Module 3: Costing Systems 2 – Activity-based Costing
• Module 4: Cost-Volume-Profit Analysis
• Module 5: Relevant Information for Decision-Making
• Module 6: Budgeting for Planning and Control
• Module 7: Standard Costing and Variance Analysis
• Module 8: Performance Measurement and Evaluation

Course Materials

There is no required textbook for this course. There are module-specific readings, which can be found on Coursera. Access to all of these readings is free of charge, and many are from Heisinger and Hoyle’s Managerial Accounting (Saylor Books).

Live Session Schedule (Tentative)

August 16th, 2017 – October 10th, 2017

Course Elements (to be updated)

• Lecture Videos
• Readings
• Case Study Activities
• Quizzes
• Exercises
• Final Exam