AC416      Half Unit
Topics in Financial Reporting

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

Availability

Requisites

Mutually exclusive courses:

This course cannot be taken with AC491 at any time on the same degree programme.

Additional requisites:

Prior knowledge of financial accounting is assumed.  AC480 (Qualitative Methods in Accounting and Finance) is a pre-requisite for students with no/little prior knowledge of financial accounting.

Corporate financial statements are a key source of information about the economic activities of a firm. This course is intended to enhance the student's ability to relate economic events to financial statements and disclosures. It also seeks to aid in developing a coordinated set of concepts and principles to serve as a framework for analysing a wide variety of financial reporting issues. The goal is to enable students to understand the mapping between underlying economic events and the information in financial statements, and how this mapping affects inferences about the economic activities and position of the firm. The course also explores the regulatory environment and political climate, and how these link with the introduction of new standards and their underlying theories. Students are encouraged to relate economic events to diverse practices in financial statements, and to think critically of ongoing controversies and debates.

The emphasis of this course is on understanding and critical thinking, rather than bookkeeping. The course draws heavily on academic literature on the suggested topics.

The course objectives are achieved through teaching a variety of financial reporting issues and topics including the following: standard setting with respect to the conceptual frameworks; accounting for leases and pensions; accounting for value creation with special emphasis on cash flows statements and revenue recognition; capital markets efficiency; corporate disclosure; and corporate governance. Most topics are covered from an International Financial Reporting Standards and/or United States Generally Accepted Accounting Principles perspective. 

Detailed choice of subjects will be determined by those lecturing on the course and may vary to some extent from year to year. Knowledge of basic accounting is assumed.

30 hours of seminars in the Autumn Term.
0 hours of lectures.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Autumn Term.

Teaching is delivered in two one and a half hour sessions over 10 weeks, with a reading week in week 6. Sessions contain a variety of technical content, practical exercises, and case analyses. 

Students are expected to prepare for each session in advance, having done the assigned readings and having prepared the assigned cases.

Detailed reading lists are handed out at the start of the course. Relevant books covering specific parts of the course are:

• Financial Reporting and Analysis, by Revsine, Collins, Johnson,  and Mittelstaedt, and Soffer (McGraw Hill, 8th ed.);
• Financial Accounting: An Introduction to Concepts, Methods and Uses, by Stickney, Weil, Schipper and Francis (Thomson Learning, South-Western, 14th ed.).

Exam (75%), duration: 120 Minutes in the January exam period

Continuous assessment (5%)

Project (20%)

Continuous assessment consists of a set of quizzes to be submitted online. The group project will require students to search the press for issues of relevance to the topic they have been assigned and produce a five-page report which they will present.