Accounting and Finance, MSc

University of Greenwich

For students to consolidate grammatical accuracy and knowledge of vocational and academic lexis in written and spoken English; to further develop critical awareness of features of written and spoken texts such as discourse, register and appropriateness of style; to broaden their range of writing skills to a higher level of fluency and refine usage and command of style and register; gain a better understanding of the need to use clear and consistent systems of referencing and an ability to put such systems into practice.

This module aims to provide an informed understanding of the changing role of management accounting. Students will have an intensive grounding in the key areas of Management Accounting. There is a strong focus on developing students? skills in the application of management accounting techniques to quantitative and qualitative information for planning, decision-making, performance evaluation, and control. Additionally, the module aims to improve the students understanding of how management accounting problems can be analysed by developing robust and reliable financial models.

To apply the practical skills and knowledge of research techniques established in the Research Methods course in order to manage a small-scale research project in the field of accounting or finance; to develop an understanding of the relationship between theory and practice and extend capacity for analysis and logical inference; to research a chosen topic area with the academic rigour appropriate for work at masters level using the knowledge and skills acquired through the taught courses; to demonstrate an ability to analyse specific intellectual theories and concepts as presented in the academic literature and to apply them in an empirical study.

To enable students to understand and apply a range of skills in respect of listening, note taking and studying in a postgraduate financial environment. ? To equip students with skills in reading and writing at advanced levels. ? To introduce students to key elements of university writing and academic journal writing. ? To provide students with the opportunity to think laterally and argue rationally and applying these skills in planning written work and presenting written/oral data in appropriate format. ? To provide students with basic statistical skills and to train students in statistical analysis. ? To present descriptive statistics and graphs in SPSS. ? To discuss random variables and measures of central tendency and variation as well as, measures of association (bivariate correlation and simple linear regression), addressing issues such as extreme values, omitted variables and tests of normality of distribution.

Through attending this course, students will gain an understanding of the main concepts and techniques of financial accounting and reporting. The course will introduce basic bookkeeping principles and then from this grounding, students will explore a variety of accounting standards (International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRSs)) at a greater depth. This combines a mixture of numerical work (the preparation of final statements, ratio analysis) with the underlying theory and its application (the qualitative characteristics of the Conceptual Framework, the recognition and measurement of assets and liabilities).

This fundamental module in Finance aims to provide students with an understanding of the role of finance in business; the nature of available financial instruments and determinants of the prices of marketable securities; investment appraisal decisions, risk management methods, capital structure and dividend policy. All of these topics are studied in the context of effective financial management, corporate governance and business ethics. During the course students will gain an understanding of long-term financial strategies, basic valuation principles, basics of company valuation, effective investment decisions, bond pricing, cost of capital and capital asset pricing, corporate governance and ethics and basics of financial risk management, among others. Finance theories, tools and techniques covered in the course can be utilized in any management decision-making process in any business sector. This module will provide an introduction to the theory and practice of finance and so provide a foundation for a more in-depth study of different aspects of finance in the MSc programmes.

To develop a suitable research proposal in accounting, finance, banking, investment, financial management or other appropriate area of accounting or finance; To develop skills in manipulating and analysing datasets using statistical techniques and packages; completion of the Dissertation course (either 45 or 30 credit variant).