Course 3 - Advanced Management Accounting

Outline:

In this course, we discuss fundamental issues of advanced management accounting and control in an international context. Based on the knowledge of the courses AMC1 and AMC 2, we identify important tools of management accounting, which are widely used in corporate practice all over the world. We focus on topics especially important for decentralized large international firms like transfer pricing and performance measurement & incentives and intensify knowledge about basic processes like budgeting and variance analysis.

In this context we also address the increasing importance of non-financial information and its usage in management accounting. The course is based on an international textbook (Bhimani, Horngreen, Datar, and Rajan 2019) to allow for discussing all related topics in English.

You need to be able to use Excel or a similar calculation programme!

Learning Outcomes:

Students develop a solid understanding of the advanced concept of management accounting and control in an international context.

They gain insight into the questions of how and when management accounting tools may be helpful for controlling the firm. They develop skills to see the (increasing) need for management accounting tools in large decentralized companies and learn to judge the costs and benefits of the usage of different management accounting tools. Additionally, they know about the importance of considering non-financial information in management accounting.

Teaching Method:

Students are supposed to prepare for the lectures by reading the related chapters in the textbook, the course is based on, and going through the additional lecture material on learn@wu.

In the teaching sessions, we will do excercises  together to deepen the understanding of the different topic. Students are actively involved in developing solutions during the lecture. In addition, they can ask targeted questions about the readings and the additional lecture material.

By means of home exercises, students recap the course’s content.