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Fundamentals of Accounting Online Course
What does the profit and loss statement or the balance sheet tell us? What are the key financial indicators? How can I assess the profitability of investments? And what are the key principles of budgeting? How can I use accounting in support of strategic business management?
A company's financial statements and accounting information reveal a great deal about its financial position and performance, as long as you know how to read and use them. Understanding accounting helps you interpret financial information with confidence and make better decisions in your own work.
Now, the essentials of accounting can be studied through convenient online courses, available regardless of time and place. Fundamentals of Accounting is a learning path of two self-paced online courses, introducing learners first to financial accounting and then to management accounting.
The courses can be purchased separately or together as a learning path.
The course is available both in English and Finnish.
Fundamentals of Accounting is one of our most popular online courses, and we have now renewed it to make it even more learner-friendly. The high-quality content and the instructor remain the same, but in addition to the video lessons, you can now deepen your learning through text content and reflection tasks. The videos have also been updated. The course has also been divided into two parts, so you can choose the part that interests you most, Financial Accounting or Management Accounting, or complete the entire learning path.
Take the English courseDownload info card
Learn more about the Finnish course
Learn from Professor Teemu Malmi, an Aalto University expert in management control systems and profitability analysis.
Access course materials anytime, anywhere, and progress at your own pace.
Learn to read financial statements and use accounting information to support management and decision-making.
Learning Outcomes
Each course ends with a certificate that you can use to showcase your newly acquired knowledge and skills.
After completing the courses, you will be able to:
- Distinguish between financial and management accounting, and understand the objective and contents of the financial statements
- Interpret the balance sheet, income statement, and cash flow statement, and the connections between them
- Calculate and interpret key ratios for profitability, capital structure, liquidity, and efficiency
- Assess whether a company's financial position is good, moderate, or weak, and justify your assessment
- Explain key cost concepts and how costs are assigned to products and services
- Describe how accounting supports strategy implementation and how budgeting supports management
- Use cost-volume-profit analysis and break-even analysis to support decisions
- Evaluate the profitability of investments using NPV, IRR, and the payback period
For
The courses are ideal for anyone who deals with financial information in their work but is not a finance professional, for example managers, specialists, entrepreneurs, and board members. There are no prerequisites to join the courses.
Contents and Schedule
Fundamentals of Accounting is a set of two online courses, the first focusing on financial accounting and the second on management accounting.
Courses can be purchased separately or together as a learning path.
Both courses consist of video lessons, in-depth text sections, reflection tasks, and test-your-knowledge sections, and the key takeaways are brought together at the end of each module.
Part I: Financial Accounting
The first course examines how accounting produces information for a company's external stakeholders, such as investors, creditors, and owners. You will learn to read and interpret the financial statements and to assess a company's financial position using key financial ratios.
- Financial and management accounting
- Contents and objectives of the financial statements
- Bookkeeping
- Balance sheet
- Income statement
- Cash flow statement
- Profitability ratios
- Capital structure and liquidity ratios
- Efficiency and per-share ratios
Part II: Management Accounting
The second course turns the focus inside the company. You will learn how accounting information supports management and decision-making, from cost accounting and budgeting to pricing and investment decisions.
- Cost accounting tasks and cost concepts
- Product and service costing
- Accounting for strategic management
- Management of a profit center organization
- Budgeting
- Budgetary system
- Ad hoc calculations and cost-volume-profit analysis
- Pricing
- Estimating the profitability of investments
Instructor
Teemu Malmi
Teemu Malmi is a Professor of Accounting and Head of the Department of Accounting at Aalto University School of Business.
Professor Malmi specializes in management systems, strategy implementation, and cost and profitability accounting. He teaches frequently in a variety of Executive Programs and has served as an advisor to a large number of companies from various different industries: IT, electronics, energy, finance, food, health care, media, metal and engineering, paper and pulp, pharmaceuticals, rental services, retail, telecom and transportation/logistics and the public sector.
Teemu Malmi holds a Ph.D. in Accounting and Finance from The Helsinki School of Economics, which was merged into Aalto University in 2010.
