financial accounting courses

financial accounting courses

The Importance of Financial Accounting Courses in Higher Education

1. Introduction to Financial Accounting

One tool that can be used to evaluate the relative importance of the required content of financial accounting courses is the inclusive institutional mission. The mission can be assessed through a review of curriculum requirements and the relative distribution of seats offered in the required courses data. Corporate governance and related curriculum issues are ongoing topics of great contemporary interest in the accounting course. These issues have increased the demand for higher education and related professional training in this arena. To provide context and specific detail, this position paper documents the curriculum requirements of a large stratified sample of US colleges and universities with external and/or financial accounting requirements.

Anecdotal evidence from us and other accounting educators implies that students often question the importance of financial accounting courses. They point out that many of the novice accounting skills required at the entry-level job are easily learned through formal or informal training after graduation. This belief, often held by the students of financial accounting, may contribute to student shortcomings in the course. Understanding the importance of the financial accounting course curriculum leads to more engaged and motivated students, and might consequently improve the lackluster performance of this group.

2. Key Concepts and Principles in Financial Accounting

The accounting program specifically offers a forum where the measurement needs of particular communities can be discussed and debated. Experience shows that no one-size-fits-all output set of measurements exists. Financial accounting courses present a prescribed set of measurements based on established accounting principles, which are designed specifically for external parties. These measuring techniques are presumably used because they satisfy groups of people who may not have the opportunity to say what they want. Investors and creditors have material stakes in the entities on which they rely on financial statements. They often obtain money or other value in exchange for practice, which depend on the financial statements. Yet it must be remembered that the financial statement is a tool, imperfect, designed to elicit questions. Organizations are then left to communicate about assumptions and estimates. The need for judgment suggests that accounting education must be enriched with ongoing education about how to communicate behind the numbers.

The essence of accounting is to measure the consequences of economic actions and to provide an understanding of the effects of business operations. Financial accounting is concerned with numbers, as in evaluating the outcomes of activities. Measurement of business operations is thus a main objective of financial accounting. Output measurements can help illuminate questions of costs, allocation of funds, and preparedness for issues like providing services, developing new products, responding to emergencies, helping those in need, and sharing knowledge and information. Accurate and efficient measurement has allowed for the growth in global trade and finance and for development of capital markets systems. There are four basic financial statements about the company: balance sheet, which presents the liquidation value of a company at a particular point in time; income statement, which summarizes the revenues and expenses of a company over a period; statement of cash flows; and the statement of shareholders’ equity.

3. The Role of Financial Accounting in Business Operations

Accountants communicate information about business organizations, most often in comparison to previous periods, to identify changes in the business. Changes such as the relative profitability and productivity as it relates to the deployment of resources. If managers, lenders, and investors believe that the historical statements of accounting data do not provide information about future performance, we might ask why they use this information to help make decisions. Of course, some accountants argue about the kind of data or the way that transactions are accounted for, but they do not deny the importance of accounting as a linkage between the past, present, and future business performance. The historical data should help users understand the effect of present activities on future performance.

Students must understand the importance of accounting knowledge in management and administrative roles. Regardless of their major, all university graduates will be expected to master basic accounting principles and procedures. Before attempting to understand the varied accounting concepts and use them in management or professional decision-making, students need a factual understanding of accounting and accounting systems. Students majoring in business, or any other discipline, should understand the concepts and procedures necessary to generate and analyze financial statements.

4. Advanced Topics in Financial Accounting

Not all the topics presented are particularly difficult to understand. In fact, we have chosen to discuss some selected topics that, while complex to apply, are fundamental to understanding the implications of financial reporting. We hope you, as future business decision-makers, will learn enough about the topics to understand the economic effects of implementing them and be better able to evaluate the financial statements in your future organizations, using information obtained through the application of procedures and concepts presented.

As previously mentioned, the second goal of Financial Accounting is to have an understanding of the accounting and reporting systems used by publicly traded companies. To accomplish this, you, as future business decision-makers, will need more than just an understanding of the basic accounting concepts presented this semester. This course is designed to cover selected topics in financial accounting that are either (1) too complex for an introductory course or (2) not emphasized in an introductory course, but are important. The topics covered vary in the emphasis the accounting profession places on them, and for that reason, we plan to (time permitting) cover the selected topics in enough depth to make you familiar with them, so that should the need arise, you will at least have a source from which to begin if more detail is necessary.

5. The Future of Financial Accounting Education

One will say that this alters the future perspective of financial accounting education. Changes will occur in curricula planned by education institutions for the undergraduate level, which is responsible for human resources formation that will dominate the area, and especially for the specialized courses that will lead professionals to update mastered knowledge and that will attend specific accounting requests. In reality, majors of administrative and economic areas already come doing this, specializing disciplines in the first two years or choosing school memory subjects in accounting. However, in agreement with Barreto, this is a subject that still feeds great controversy about what professional and what competences must present. These are points that will fit the specialized finance professor, and accountancy courses are to include in their objectives in the future trends for the profession and also in the tendency of profile alteration of the future superior formation in new graduation majors, or still, of the new MBA programs.

Human existence presents itself much more hectically now, with intense and brief contacts being a characteristic in a society always rushing for something else. This applies to everything, including higher education. The tendency to obtain financial success as soon as possible leads a lot of young people to search for knowledge in apparently quick and easy areas. For those economically oriented, financial administration appears as a saving straw in an ocean of uncertainty. This is reflected in the number and quality of the students who attend accounting courses at universities and parallels a clear reduction of the ability of the human resources formed to meet these businessmen’s needs. But the opposite is also true. The economic growth in almost all the countries in the last varying years, occurring at a much more intense level, has changed businessmen’s profile, who began to look more assiduously for knowledge associated with financial reporting. The formation of analysts and accounting appraisers began to be offered much more constantly by educational institutions recognizing these necessities.