Managerial Accounting: Tools for Facilitating and Guiding Business Decisions

In this course, you will explore how to use accounting to allocate resources and incentivize manager and employee behaviors with these resources. You will also learn how financial and non-financial accounting information facilitates strategic performance measurement and how to integrate this information to continuously improve strategy. You will be able to: • Understand the role of managerial accounting information and use it to avoid common pitfalls in business decisions • Understand the iterative and interrelated nature of budgeting and apply the key components to preparing a master budget • Evaluate capital investments via a variety of measures • Calculate, interpret, and investigate variances • Understand decentralization and its advantages and disadvantages • Communicate the role of non-financial measures and strategic performance measurement systems • Compute and interpret financial performance measures and identify associate issues This course is part of Gies College of Business’ suite of online programs, including the iMBA and iMSM. Learn more about admission into these programs and explore how your Coursera work can be leveraged if accepted into a degree program at https://degrees.giesbusiness.illinois.edu/idegrees/.

• Course Overview and Relevant Information for Decision Making
• In this module, you will become familiar with the course, your instructor, your classmates, and our learning environment. Decisions are at the heart of all organizations. In this module, you will also explore the nature and role of relevant information in common business decisions, and how such information facilitates these decisions and helps managers and employees avoid common pitfalls. You will also consider how the financial perspective adopted by accountants complements other, qualitative perspectives.
• Standard Costing and Variance Analysis
• After establishing goals, setting targets, and the budget, upper management uses variance analysis to compare, assess, and investigate differences between actual and expected performance. In this module, you will learn how upper management uses variance analysis to motivate and monitor managers and employees, how to perform variance analysis on any aspect of the organization, and ultimately understand the power of this important tool for planning and control.
• Performance Measurement and Evaluation
• Accountants help implement, communicate, and evolve organizational strategy via the information they provide to owners, managers, and employees. Specifically, they help plan, monitor, and control decisions via the performance measurement, evaluation, and compensation system. In this module, you will explore many aspects of this important system, including decentralization, financial and non-financial performance measurement, strategic performance measurement systems, and subjective performance evaluation.
• Budgeting for Planning and Control
• At the heart of an organization’s planning and control function is its budget. In this module, you will explore the purpose of budgeting, the role of managers and employees in budgeting, and related implications. You will also develop an organization’s budget, ultimately understanding the iterative nature among the budget’s key components: the operations, financing, and capital investments budgets.