The Advanced Financial Decision Making course aims to enable students to analyse complex financial choices, both external and internal, facing a company and propose courses of action that are consistent with the organisation’s goals.
The course begins with a refresher of key topics covered on Financial Decision Making before moving on to financial reporting. Here, the course covers the consolidation process for a group of companies, examines the information available in annual corporate reports and looks at current reporting trends.
Management accounting then looks at tools to solve problems of resource allocation and moves on to other key tools currently used in practice including target and lifecycle costing, total quality management, six sigma and kaizen costing.
Planning and budgeting are the next topics where there is extensive coverage of compiling budgets, divisional performance management, transfer pricing issues and non-financial performance metrics.
We then move into the major area of financial management and the course covers tools to manage elements of working capital, complex capital investment appraisal, corporate valuations, and M&A (mergers and acquisition). Risk management is then examined, concentrating on exchange rate and interest rate risk exposures and how these are managed by companies.
The penultimate topics are corporate failure and business reconstruction. The course concludes with a discussion on current trends in finance and accounting.
Detailed topics include:
- International accounting and basic group accounting (consolidation)
- Annual corporate reports and interpreting information
- Earnings management and accounting scandals
- Corporate reporting and disclosure trends
- Alternative management accounting tools and techniques
- Planning and performance evaluation
- Working capital management
- Advanced capital investment appraisal
- Corporate share and bond valuation
- Mergers and acquisitions
- Exchange rate risk management
- Interest rate risk management
- Corporate failure and business restructuring
- Current issues in finance and accounting