Financial Accounting
How do investors, creditors, and other users analyze financial statements to assess corporate performance? Learn financial accounting, how to read financial statements, and how to gather inputs to valuation models.
Course Information
Certificate Track
Learn for Free
About this Course
Accounting is the language of business. It is difficult to understand business without knowing some accounting. Knowing accounting will help learners better understand and contribute to their own companies and better understand business around them.
This course is part of the MicroMasters® Program in Finance and provides a rigorous introduction to the principles of financial accounting. We focus on the preparation and analysis of financial statements, and on why financial statements take the form they do. We cover the basic structure of financial reports and the process of recording transactions. We will also learn how investors, creditors, and other users analyze financial statements to assess corporate performance. The course focuses on using the financial statements to gather inputs to valuation models and for corporate finance decisions.
This course offers general managers, financial analysts, financial advisors, quantitative researchers, asset managers, risk managers, quantitative developers working in financial services, and professionals servicing the financial industry the tools to succeed. Undergraduate and graduate students looking to enter business in general or finance in particular would also benefit greatly from this valuable course.
What you'll learn
- Understand accounting terms
- Understand how financial statements are constructed
- Ability to read financial statements
- Gather inputs to valuation models and for corporate finance decisions
Prerequisites
Basic math
Meet your instructors
John E. Core
Nanyang Technological University Professor and a Professor of Accounting, Sloan School of Management
John E. Core is the Nanyang Technological University Professor and a Professor of Accounting at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
Core has broad research interests in executive compensation and executive stock and option incentives, corporate governance, nonprofit governance, and disclosure and the cost of capital. His research has been published in the Accounting Review , the Journal of Accounting & Economics, the Journal of Accounting Research , the Journal of Finance , and the Journal of Financial Economics. When not conducting research, Core teaches the core Financial Accounting class to first-year MBA students at MIT Sloan. Prior to entering academia, he worked in investment banking for PaineWebber and in compensation consulting for Ernst & Young.
Core holds a BA from Yale University and a PhD from The Wharton School.
