The MS in Accounting is designed for smart, hardworking professionals with integrity and passion who want to substantially enhance their understanding of accounting and broaden their career opportunities. The online MSA prepares you to become an accountant with deep financial expertise, decision-making ability, and effective communication skills—qualities that will set you apart to top employers.
Expand your accounting career opportunities
The MS in Accounting is delivered by Kelley faculty in partnership with edX, using edX’s platform. This degree is subject to a special tuition and fee rate.
MicroMasters® in Accounting suspended
The MicroMasters in Accounting will be suspended this year. If you are planning to complete the MicroMasters courses to enter the Kelley School of Business MS in Accounting program, you must complete the courses by summer 2022 to begin the master's degree program in the fall.
Program start dates
- Spring 2022: February 21, 2022
- Fall 2022: August 22, 2022
Applications for Kelley programs offered via edX may be submitted on a rolling basis. Should you be admitted to the master’s program, you would begin courses through Indiana University in the next available spring or fall term, pending completion of your MicroMasters® courses via the edX platform.
Complete this 30 credit hour degree in 21 months and graduate with expertise in:
- Financial and managerial accounting
- Financial statement analysis
- Finance
- Tax planning and strategy
- Auditing
- Analytics–based decision making
The online program is designed to be flexible and rigorous, allowing you to complete a high quality program on your own schedule, and at your own pace. You’ll start with three MicroMasters® courses on the edX online learning platform. If accepted into the MS in Accounting program, your three courses will count towards the master’s degree. Once these first three courses are complete, admitted applicants will then start the master’s degree program and be considered an IU student.
Plan of study
Course | Title | Term |
BUKX-A593 | Financial Reporting II* | Spring |
BUKX-A594 | Financial Management | Summer |
BUKX-A595 | Financial Statements Analysis and Valuation | Summer |
BUKX-A596 | Advanced Financial Accounting | Fall |
BUKX-A597 | Law and Negotiations | Fall |
BUKX-A598 | Auditing and Internal Controls | Winter |
BUKX-A599 | Analytical Methods and Decision-Making | Winter |
*All students must start with this course.
Please note: Students entering the program in fall 2022 will be part of a model cohort. Courses are tentatively planned for the following sequence:
Course | Title | Term |
BUKX-A593 | Financial Reporting II* | Fall 2022 |
BUKX-A594 | Financial Management | Fall 2022 |
BUKX-A595 | Financial Statements Analysis and Valuation | Winter 2022 |
BUKX-A599 | Analytical Methods and Decision-Making | Winter 2022 |
BUKX-A596 | Advanced Financial Accounting | Spring 2023 |
BUKX-A597 | Law and Negotiations | Summer 2023 |
BUKX-A598 | Auditing and Internal Controls | Summer 2023 |
*All students must start with this course.
Course descriptions
Understand how firms measure and report financial position and financial performance in a set of financial statements. This course helps you earn a strong foundation in financial reporting concepts and methods, and use your skills to prepare and analyze financial statements.
- Part of MicroMasters®
How do firms make critical strategic decisions using accounting information? In this course, you’ll discover how to prepare and analyze accounting information to make complex business decisions.
- Part of MicroMasters®
How do income taxes impact firms, their strategies, capital structure, and after-tax profits? This course focuses on understanding the legal, conceptual, and integrative aspects of US federal income taxation.
- Part of MicroMasters®
- Provides students with a deep understanding of accounting for firms’ financing activities, including long-term liabilities and debt issues (bonds, notes, mortgages, leases, others), stockholders' equity, and preparation of cash flow statements. This course’s first objective is to give students the tools necessary to understand and execute appropriate accounting.
- The second objective is to help students understand the process through which accounting standards are determined and to evaluate the outcomes of that process from the perspectives of managers, shareholders, auditors, and others. Students will learn to assess competing accounting theories and methods from multiple perspectives.
- The course will also help students understand the impact of this accounting information on investors’ and creditors’ decision-making.
- The finance course provides an introduction into basic principles and perspectives of financial data, analysis, and decision-making.
- Covered topics include the time value of money, risk and return, interest rates and debt risk, capital budgeting, security pricing, and portfolio.
- The course will also cover capital budgeting, the valuation of firms, and capital structure. Students will make extensive use of spreadsheet modeling to implement financial models.
- This course will provide you with tools to analyze and exploit information in corporate financial statements. The course will teach you how to use financial statement information for firm valuation and other economic decisions.
- The course will also help you understand and analyze the issues that corporate managers face as they design and implement financial reporting strategies, increasing your ability to assess earnings quality, and detect and undo earnings.
- The analytical framework and practical tools of this course will help you to improve your ability to read and analyze financial statements, which should be useful whether your career interests arise in finance, marketing, strategy, consulting, accounting, operations, entrepreneurship, or some other field.
- This course will give students a deeper understanding of generally accepted accounting principles as applied to more complex financial events, arrangements, and transactions.
- The course will cover accounting and reporting issues for partnerships, business combinations, financial reporting for combined entities and inter-company investments, foreign currency and hedging activities, derivatives, segment reporting, and good-will allocation/impairment. The course places particular emphasis on consolidated financial statements.
- This course examines the law governing business organizations—partnerships, corporations, limited liability companies, and others—and the social policy underlying the law.
- The primary focus is on corporations, including such topics as fundamental corporate transactions and the role, rights, powers, and duties of the various corporate actors.
- The course will also explore topics of negotiation, resolving conflict, and leading change. Students will become wiser and more thoughtful decision makers; more competent problem solvers; bolder, less risk-averse leaders of people; and more effective, persuasive communicators.
- This course provides a strong focus on thinking skills and analytics used to enhance the business decision-making process. The class process will include breaking down a problem to its core, assembling a plan of action, and then implementing that plan with analytical tools. Analytic analysis is not simply about the quantitative methods; rather, it must have the qualitative component to be effective—you must be able to properly define the problem. This course delivers a strong emphasis on both components. The qualitative component includes critical thinking, troubleshooting, problem solving, decision-making, teamwork and collaboration, and process flow. The quantitative component emphasizes analytics.
- In this class, we will use Excel as the technology of choice to convert data into information. Data analysis topics include data manipulation, retrieval, and calculation. An additional component of the class will be modeling the decision-making process with flow charts and Excel form controls. Class examples will be derived from actual business cases and analysis.
Respected degree
Upon graduation, you’ll receive a Master of Science from the Indiana University Kelley School of Business—the same degree students studying on the IU campus receive.
More information? Contact edxksb@indiana.edu or 812-855-7282.
Academic calendar 2021-22
Kelley via edX observes an efficient four-term calendar designed for students who are also working professionals. You can complete the MS program in just over one year. The fall, winter, spring, and summer terms are 12 weeks long. The winter term includes a one-week break for the holidays.
Terms | Dates | Breaks |
Fall | Aug. 23–Nov. 11 | N/A |
Winter | Nov. 15–Feb. 17 | Nov. 22–28, Dec. 25–Jan. 2, Jan. 17 |
Spring | Feb. 21–May 12 | N/A |
Summer | May 23–Aug. 11 | May 30, June 20, July 4 |
Tess Follin, MSA'22 As a mom of two young children, the program has been a great way for me to continue learning and advance my career. It has allowed me the flexibility to master the material at a pace, and on a schedule, that I can adapt to fit the many other aspects of being a working parent. The content has been very practical. Upon completion of each course, I have felt confident applying the material to real-life situations.