MScBA Accounting & Financial Management

This course integrates advanced managerial accounting topics with recent techniques of financial management and strategic analysis. It focuses on preparing, evaluating and interpreting financial information for managerial decision making in different types of organization (manufacturing and service companies; for-profit and not-for-profit). Topics covered include advanced cost allocation techniques (like Time-Driven Activity-Based Costing), evaluation of financial information to support project appraisal and capital budgeting, pricing strategies, as well as the latest techniques for customer profitability analysis and other short- and long-term investment decisions.

The course involves the extensive use of the case method to analyse and discuss how financial information integrated with non-financial information is used to effectively support managerial decision making. Students are expected to apply appropriate analytical frameworks to diagnose and solve complex problems by emphasizing the connection between financial information and data analysis techniques that fit with management’s specific needs. The course provides a highly interactive environment that combines theory and practice sessions with group assignments, presentations and discussions.

Review the course guide for more details.

Taught by Dr S. Kramer and J. Zhao, MSc.

This course provides an overview of the key issues in financial reporting. We use International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) as our anchor and relate the requirements for selected topics to the underlying concepts and principles. This will help you learn to make informed judgements and think critically about financial reporting problems. These are necessary skills for your future career, whether you will be preparing, auditing or using financial statements. But perhaps even more importantly, this course examines the international and political processes that shape the accounting standards and practices in Europe and the rest of the world. For every selected reporting topic, we take a step back to look at the underlying problem and critically evaluate the solution that the current standards provide.  

Financial reporting is a powerful tool that influences the allocation of scarce resources across market participants. Although the IFRS Conceptual Framework identifies investors as the primary users of financial reports, we consider the economic consequences and impact on other stakeholders and society at large. The current accounting standards and practices are central to this course, but we critically discuss the limitations of financial statements. In addition to the traditional, shareholder-oriented view of financial reporting, we explore alternative views as guided by the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG’s). We discuss the challenges of measuring and reporting a firm’s performance and financial position, in a changing business environment. The course contributes to developing a critical mindset that helps you to address the challenges of financial reporting and your knowledge on how your decisions and actions, as a future financial manager, accountant or controller, affect investors, other stakeholders and society.  

Taught by Dr M. Koning.

Accounting is the language of business. Given that the role profile of financial managers has broadened substantially in recent years with a particular emphasis on management skills, accounting and financial management graduates from our programme more than ever need to be able to communicate the key implications of this (sometimes complicated) language to a variety of different audiences in a convincing and easy manner.

Therefore, the department of Accounting and Control offers this 1 EC course to provide students with the necessary tools for preparing a good presentation and communicating its key messages effectively. It is mandatory for all incoming students in accounting and financial management.

The course format will be multiple sessions with experienced coaches and companies. To pass this course, students will need to attend the sessions. An alternative assessment format will be to prepare a presentation on a subject recorded on video.

Taught by N. Constantinescu.

In this course in ‘Business Analysis and Valuation’ you will learn the basic concepts of financial statement analysis, enabling you to understand how financial reports are used by investors and to take a fundamental approach to equity (and debt) valuation.

The course has a practical emphasis. We adopt the view of an active investor and apply methods of fundamental analysis in a series of real-life exercises, cases, and assignments involving listed companies. We examine various valuation methods—residual earnings, abnormal earnings growth, and discounted cash flow approaches to valuation, among others—and ask which one will give us an edge. We do all this under the strict discipline of a fundamentalist: separate what you know from speculation and anchor in what you know from analysing financial statement information.

Just as importantly, we learn how to handle accounting and financial reports in valuation. We see that valuation is really a matter of accounting for value. The course combines accounting principles and investment principles to answer the question: How do I account for value so that I can challenge stock prices with some confidence?

As members of RSM, we aim to be a force for positive change in the world, using as guidance the framework set out by the UN Sustainability Development Goals (SDGs) to address the most urgent social, economic, and environmental challenges. Business analysis and valuation can play a leading role in allocating resources to sustainable companies and, thereby, accelerate the transition to a sustainable economy. We will discuss how environmental, societal, and governance (ESG) performance affects firm value. For example, a strategy analysis (Learning Goal (LG) 2) includes the assessment of a firm’s innovation (SDG 9) and responsible production (SDG 12), which can significantly affect a firm’s expected profitability and growth, two key drivers of future performance and value. Credit agencies may increasingly lower their assessments of firms’ creditworthiness (LG 7) for environmental liabilities expected to result from pollution (SDG 6). Similarly, when pricing risk for valuation purposes, environmental damages significantly affect a firm’s cost of capital (LG 8).

The course discusses techniques that are commonly used in an equity research department of a bank, independent research firm, or equity hedge fund. However, the material covered in the course is just as relevant to the corporate business analyst or financial consultant, for private equity analysis, for evaluating acquisitions, restructurings and other investments, and for calculating the value generated by strategic decisions. Thus, the course is of interest to those contemplating careers in investment banking, security analysis, accounting, consulting, and corporate finance.

Taught by Dr C.P.R. Pietsch.

The aim of ‘Your Future Career’ is to prepare RSM students at an early stage in their master's for their careers.

The online modules will help you make crucial steps towards the most suitable career step, whether an internship or a job.

To pass the course, you need to gain a minimum number of points within a few months. You can decide if you want to reflect on your interests and motivations, develop knowledge of the job market, receive peer feedback on application materials, learn to love networking, or attend an interactive alumni career panel or workshop.

See this page for more details.

This course is overseen and guided by Dr Maciej Szymanowski and Lisanne Keir

Financial statements are an important source of information for stakeholders like shareholders, creditors, employees, the general public etc., to value their prospective claims. Over time, accounting scandals like Enron, Worldcom, AIG and Lehman Brothers have indicated that managers have incentives to use their discretion to affect financial reporting in order to serve their own benefits. Thus, to reassure stakeholders and restore and strengthen their confidence in financial statements, regulators require firms to have their financial statements assured by third parties, namely auditors or certified public accountants (CPAs). CPAs are the equivalent to Dutch register accountants. This course addresses the function and relevance of auditors in more detail and considers the decisions and dilemmas that auditors are faced with as part of their job. 

Taught by Dr C. Pietsch and S. Stirnkorb, MSc.

The role of the financial controller is changing in ways that mirror those of the broader finance function. Rather than serving as a rear-view mirror that only provides information about historical performance, the financial controller increasingly participate in the analysis and formulation of solutions to higher value-added, strategic issues. Reliance on forward-looking techniques tools allows the finance function to anticipate the future needs of the company to drive appropriate action, improve the current operating results and eventually maximize the bottom line.

The dynamic and integrative role of the controller function in business corporations is the focus of this course. Classes cover the principles underlying planning and control decisions in functional and divisional organizations, as well the design and consequences of responsibility accounting and performance measurement systems under various market conditions. The course also extends to financial controller’s roles in budgeting, strategic planning, pricing, risk management, corporate finance and investment related decision making.

Taught by Dr F. Elsinger.

Sayings such as “To know your present you must know your past” abound. This is true for the field of accounting as well. As an example, the European Artificial Intelligence (AI) Act (2021), the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act (2022) raised the issue of auditing AI systems. Can the task of auditing financial statements inform the audit of AI systems? Understanding the historical developments of financial auditing and its extension to other fields such as environmental auditing could give us hints as to how the auditing profession might develop to audit the new technologies contained in the term AI.

Fundamentally, this course aims to prepare the modern accountant. It does so by giving students a sound foundation into the historical developments of the five main sub-domains of accounting (i.e., financial reporting, auditing, financial statement analysis, management accounting and accounting information systems), while exploring how each of the five sub-domains are affected by technological innovations and algorithms. In order to achieve its fundamental purpose, the course requires students to read influential and critical accounting papers and discuss them, and link fundamental accounting developments with the innovations introduced by algorithms.

Because the course is essentially about algorithms and the models used or produced by algorithms, the workshops focus on building algorithms using the standard approach of tidy modeling with R (Kuhn and Silge) and communicating about algorithms, models and results in a reproducible way via R markdown documents (Xie, Allaire and Grolemund).

Taught by Dr I. Sandu.

Taxes affect many business decisions, such as: where to invest, what organizational form to choose, how to finance a business, when and where to recognize revenues and expenses. This is an introductory course providing you with an overview of what taxes exist, to which natural or legal persons they apply, how taxation affects business decisions, and what the fundamentals of domestic and international taxation are.

The course combines financial accounting, tax accounting, and investment principles to answer the question: How do I take tax-optimal business decisions? This knowledge is complemented by information about recent political developments in the area of taxation. The content from the lecture is applied and deepened during workshops. Guest lectures provide additional insights from practice.

The fundamentals in domestic and international taxation form basic knowledge of auditors, tax advisors, and practitioners in the accounting or tax departments of multinationals. Thus, the course is of interest to those contemplating careers in accounting, consulting, and corporate finance.

Taught by Dr S. Kohlhase.

Corporate takeovers are one of the most important corporate events. Furthermore, during the takeover process firms encounter several challenges, such as legal, cultural, and regulatory hurdles. Overall, the argument to take over another firm must be very compelling. However, takeovers intensify agency problems between the stakeholders, most importantly between the management and the shareholders. This course focuses on the role of corporate governance with special emphasis on the context of takeovers or mergers and acquisitions (M&A).

The goal of this course is to provide students with a general understanding of corporate governance mechanisms within the firm. It also highlights the importance of corporate governance in the context of M&As. Furthermore, the course combines theory, empirical evidence, and practitioners’ views on topics at the intersection of accounting, M&A, and corporate governance. Guest lectures throughout the course provide students with the unique opportunity to gain insights from and engage in discussions with specialists from the field.

After participating in this course we hope that you improve your decision making by recognizing that corporate governance plays a crucial part in takeover activities as well as in the functioning of the firm by reducing agency conflicts stemming from the separation of ownership and control.

Taught by Dr S. Vanhaverbeke.

Environmental and social questions such as climate change, biodiversity loss, resource scarcity, work safety, and inequality are pressing matters. That is why governments around the world have environmental, social, and governance (ESG) topics high on their political agenda. Addressing ESG matters requires joint efforts of societal actors such as governments, companies, and individuals resulting in reliable regulation as well as safe and pollution-free production.

Accounting with its subdisciplines traditionally communicates how the company’s management has used economic resources to company owners, managers, or the government. While this demonstrates accountability for financial resources, companies also have environmental and social impacts for which they are accountable. Thus, accounting has evolved and must further evolve to serve its purposes and requirements in a sustainable world.

This course will endow students with the knowledge of extant ESG accounting frameworks that are used to measure, plan, and report on ESG matters. The course will also provide students with both theoretical and practical tools to evaluate the quality of ESG disclosures and to assess key performance indicators. Moreover, the course discusses which ESG-risks and opportunities exist and how these develop from pre-financial into financial risk and opportunities. In-class workshops will engage students in the active discussion of both relevant scientific papers in the field and in the analysis of real-companies’ ESG reporting and performance. Specific emphasis will be put on the critical evaluation of the quality of the performance metrics applied, as well as on the impact that ESG performance can have on financial performance and risk.

By the end of the course, students will be familiar with the rapid development of ESG reporting that informs companies and their stakeholder groups about the environmental, social, and economic impacts of company activities. These skills enable students to advise companies on ESG matters either as an employee of an audit company or internally as a sustainability manager.

Taught by Dr. S. Kohlhase and Dr. A. Scimeca.

Economic theory treats people as if they were making rational choices. Yet, in practice, investors and managers do not always make rational decisions. In fact, a lot of CEOs admit that major business decisions come “straight from the gut”. And such judgement about money and investment plans are often clouded by biases and emotions. In the course of Behavioral Finance, we investigate how these behavioral biases impact our financial decisions, and how we can avoid the most common pitfalls.

Behavioral finance is the application of psychology to financial behavior of practitioners. It has gained prominence in academia. Daniel Kahneman and Richard Thaler were awarded the 2002 and 2017 Nobel Prize in Economics respectively for their contributions in the field. It is also appreciated by practitioners. Financial institutions such as Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, ABN Amro, and Robeco all run funds employing behavioral strategies.

Taught by Dr L. He.

The course consists of eight core sessions, that combine the following three elements:

Econometric theory, paper discussions, and applied econometrics using R (most importantly in-class paper replications). In the ninth session, previously assigned groups present the results of a paper replication.

Presentations, interactive discussions, and applying econometrics via replicating state-of-the-art research papers are the main teaching methods used in this course.

I expect students to be prepared to perform statistical analysis during the lectures (including the first lecture), in other words, to get the most out of the course, students should bring a laptop with a working version of R-studio installed and be able to perform basic data operations in R.

The software is free and can be obtained here: R-studio download

To refresh your knowledge about/familiarize yourself with R programing I suggest to have a look at the following free e-book: R for Data Science

Attendance is mandatory as follows: 8 out of 9 lectures.

Taught by Dr C.D. Peter.