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.