B031181 - FINANCIAL & COST ACCOUNTING

Italian

Italian

The pivotal concept of Financial Statement Analysis is the examination of past performance of a company in order to value its solvency, profitability and cash flow.

The course aims to develop the knowledge about logics and tools for cost accounting. The course analyses in depth cost accounting and budget systems by highlighting data and information useful for managerial decisions.

The main topics the class deals with are analyzed in several very good international
handbooks. Four of them are particularly interesting:
– S.H. Penman, Financial Statement Analysis and Securities Valuation, McGraw
Hill International Edition, 2010.
– C.P. Stickney – P. R. Brown – J. M. Wahlen, Financial Reporting, Financial
Statement Analysis, and Valuation, Thomson South-Western, 2007.

Fissi S. (2022), Cost Accounting, Create McGraw-Hill Education, Milan.

This course would like to equip you with the knowledge to read, interpret and analyze financial statement data in order to make informed business decisions regarding investment, credit, or resource allocation. Such skills are required for equity and credit analysts, executives, bankers, auditors, consultants and other users of financial information.
Financial statement analysis will be presented as a part of fundamental analysis. Fundamental analysis aims at determining the intrinsic value of a company, which is the basis for determining the target price of a company’s stock, i.e. «an estimate of a stock's future price based upon an earnings forecast and assumed valuation multiples».

Knowledges: The course aims to explain the fundamentals of programming and control system, the main tools for management control. In particular, the course aims to highlight cost accounting and budgeting system.
Skills: by the end of the course the student will be able to evaluate the financial, economic and patrimonial trends using the main programming and management control tools.

This course assumes you have a solid grasp of financial accounting concepts and principles. You should also have some notions of finance.

This course is based on lectures and tutorials.
Lectures will systematically deal with concepts and analytical tools you are requested to use. In align with an international master class approach, lectures aim at offering you a conceptual framework to manage the different phases of your analysis and draw your attention to some significant issues.
Each tutorial is conceived to give students a practical application of previously studied theoretical notions; thus, we will apply analytical tools to conduct an extensive analysis of a real company, by using its current financial statements. We will spend a third of our class time working on tutorials. You are encouraged to prepare for tutorials in teams. Team discussions will enable each of you to better understand assignments, readings, and lectures.
A mix of theoretical lectures, tutorials, and discussions provides an interactive learning environment, allowing you to achieve a better understanding of the economic meaning of the financial statement contents.

This is a taught course based on face-to-face learning and exercises

The final exam is a written test.
Students have to analyze the financial statements of a real company. They have to work out two separate documents:
a) accounting report;
b) narrative report.

The final examination is based on a written exam.

see the syllabus on moodle

- The programming and control system
- The cost management system
- The full cost product measurement
- Activity Based Costing (ABC) method
- The direct and variable cost measurement
- The operative risk
- Costs and data for budgeting system
- The budgeting system