Accounting courses are usually separated into five general categories. Two, taxes and auditing, are usually quite technical and often focus on CPA preparation. The other three categories are more general:
1. Financial accounting deals almost strictly with financial statement preparation. It focuses on pronouncements issued by the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) and the SEC, and on accounting concepts such as materiality, matching revenues and expenses, relevance, and consistency. It also considers highly technical details about consolidated financial statements, leases, pensions, income taxes, and inventory valuation methods that are often found on the CPA exam.
2. Financial accounting from a management perspective covers many of the same topics as financial accounting but it does so from the view of a manager using financial accounting information to help make decisions or to report an organization’s performance to others. This is the typical focus of an MBA financial accounting course, or a financial accounting course in a non-degreed program for executives. It is the primary focus of Accy 401, EMBA.
3. Cost and managerial accounting deals almost exclusively with accounting as a tool to help manage and understand a business. These courses focus on areas such as fixed and variable costs, how costs behave over time (e.g., the learning curve), cost systems, and ways to allocate fixed costs to products or product lines.
These courses also consider how cost information influences organizations. For example, firms with multiple divisions often sell products between divisions. The price one division charges another, the transfer price, has a major effect on how each division operates. Transfer prices are a common source of
