Regardless of which industry you work in, being a leader and making decisions in your company requires profound knowledge of accounting, because accounting is the language of business. This course will make you familiar with this language.
What Do We Offer?
Tuition Fees*
| Registration Date | Fee |
| Before Jan. 15, 2023 | EUR 1,350 |
| After Jan. 15, 2023 | EUR 1,550 |
Final exam fee: An additional final exam fee will be charged for the second and third final exam attempt.
Discounts:
- 10% group discount (for 2 or more participants working for the same institution, informed to us before by an email)
- 10% Alumni discount
- For company packages, please contact us
Payment in instalments is unfortunately not possible.
*Subject to change
Target Audience
You are the ideal candidate for this course if:
Workload
The course takes approx. 6 months assuming 5-6 hours of self-study per week. It consists of 6 units which build upon each other. You will take the units in sequence and will need to pass an online multiple choice test before accessing the next unit.
Unit 4 includes an assignment which you will need to submit at a fixed deadline.
You are not sure if you manage to complete the course within 6 months? No worries! You can apply for a course extension (6 more months) against an administrative fee.
Dates
| Course Start | Course End | Registration | Early Bird |
| Sept. 1 | Feb. 28 | Jun. 1 - Sept. 1 | By Jul. 15 |
| Mar. 1 | Aug. 31 | Dec. 1 - Mar. 1 | By Jan. 15 |
All our courses contribute to the following SDGs
This course will enhance your knowledge in the following SDGs. The SWA offers professional and executive courses dedicated to the advancement of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Registrations for the programme beginning 1 September 2023 will open on 1 June. Get notified by signing up for our newsletter.
The Certified Expert in Accounting, Leadership and Sustainability online course introduces concepts and theories of financial and managerial accounting. It also deals with the backgrounds and regulation of sustainability reporting and the value relevance of CSR/ESG reporting. It focuses on leadership aspects in accounting. Participants will get acquainted with how accounting information is used in decision making and how leadership designs accounting systems and strategically uses the disclosure system to achieve targets. The course covers applied topics of accounting and leadership.
Course Objectives
On successful completion of this course, you will have a thorough comprehension of the basic definitions, theories and concepts of financial and managerial accounting and non-financial reporting, i.e. you will be able to:
Suggestions and Recommendations
This course gives you the flexibility to decide on the timing and pace of your learning experience. However we will provide you with recommendations for you to take as much as possible from this course.
Your schedule: We will provide you a course schedule including voluntary and mandatory deadlines. The course schedule serves as a guideline for your personal learning schedule and will help you complete the programme within the given time frame.
Exercises: Even though the exercises in the script are not mandatory we strongly advise that you use them as an opportunity to check your knowledge and to prepare for the final exam.
Networking Opportunities: Use the forum to introduce yourself to your peer participants and to start interesting discussions.
Unit 1 Foundations of Financial and Non-financial Reporting
Financial accounting is a more standardised language because it is highly regulated. Unit 1 introduces you to the logic of double entry bookkeeping which helps you to understand how business transactions are recorded in financial statements. You will also learn who regulates accounting, why financial accounting is regulated, how it can be regulated and what the objectives of financial reporting are. In particular, we introduce you to International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), a set of globally accepted accounting standards which are increasingly used across the world. You will become familiar with the idea that incentives matter and that there might be conflicts between different objectives of accounting. Furthermore this unit will cover the backgrounds of sustainability reporting and provides an overview of the different non-financial reporting frameworks.
Unit 3 Managing Financial and Non-Financial Performance
Unit 3 shows the role that corporate strategy plays in the formulation of financial and non-financial KPI’s and the impact these indicators have on a company’s targets and control process. You will also learn what “managing non-financial performance” means using the example of EON's Sustainability Report. E.ON is a German company and one of the world's largest electric utility service providers. Furthermore, Unit 3 introduces you to financial statement analysis, i.e. how financial statements are used in economic decision making. The Unit deals with common size financial statements, introduces key financial indicators, but also more sophisticated tools that help us to assess a firm’s operating profitability. The Unit also discusses how financial accounting information and ESG aspects are used in credit analysis. In this context, the topic “green bonds” is also addressed.
Unit 5 Analysing Costs for Managerial Decision Making
Unit 5 covers important techniques to analyse costs for managerial decision making. The module will guide you through cost-volume profit analysis which addresses the question of how many units you need to sell to break-even. Moreover, absorption costing and variable costing are explained, which are highly relevant to calculate the value of inventory and to calculate operating income of businesses that have inventories. Finally, you will be introduced to lower price limits and to choosing the optimal product or service mix when capacities are lower than customer demand.
Unit 2 Accounting Analysis and Shareholder Value
Financial reports are the outcome of the financial reporting process. Unit 2 aims at enabling you to read and understand complex financial statements. This is an important prerequisite to analysing financial statements. Understanding IFRS reports might be of high practical relevance for several reasons: (1) Top managers should be able to understand how the business model translates into financial statements. (2) Many stakeholders base their economic decision making on published financial statements; accounting will likely have an impact on cost of capital. (3) In banks, credit decisions require thorough financial statement analysis, in most cases the clients of a bank are not from the financial sector. The Unit also discusses different valuation models and helps you to understand which role financial accounting data plays in equity valuation. You will basically learn how business models translate into financial statements and what the accounting treatments for key assets, liabilities, expenses and income are. Unit 2 is also intended to create an understanding that CSR/ESG reporting may feature (incremental) value relevance over and above accounting information
Unit 4 Basics of Cost Accounting
In Unit 4, you will learn the basics of cost accounting. This includes important concepts such as direct and indirect costs, variable and fixed costs, and total versus unit costs. To calculate profits of products or divisions, we need to allocate overhead costs. There are different options and depending on the option you choose some product or departments will look more profitable or less profitable – although the underlying business activities do not change! Specifically, the unit will introduce you to methods for allocating support department costs, to job costing, and activity-based costing. Understanding these choices is important for any performance evaluation exercise and particularly important for all if responsible for a department or business unit. Moreover, understanding cost allocation is also important, if you want to analyse investment proposals by corporate loan seekers.
Unit 6 Behavioural Aspects in Accounting
The last module introduces you to economic and psychological aspects of incentives. The knowledge provided in Unit 6 is important for all leaders, as people in leading positions must evaluate the performance of their subordinates. We will consider the non-monetary aspects that drive human behaviour and are relevant in accounting settings, such as social comparison, fairness, honesty and, reciprocity. Finally, the Unit will also provide you with recent insights regarding psychological pitfalls (heuristics and biases) in decision making, for example self-justification, overconfidence, and the sunk-cost effect.
Sample Material
*Subject to change
The flexibility of our courses offers you the opportunity to follow you own schedule and to combine daily work with professional development.
The highest quality offered will immediately improve your daily job performance as well as the performance of your institution.
Training Material
Video Lectures
Online Tests
Each unit ends with an online test comprising a set of 15 multiple choice questions. Only after having successfully completed an online test you will gain access to the next unit.
Reading Material
A PDF script is for most of our courses the main studying material. This reading material provides basic concepts and principles applicable to the subject of each unit.
Assignments
The key to successful learning is the immediate use of newly acquired knowledge and the transfer of theory into practice. Our online courses are therefore supplemented by mandatory assignments.
Discussion Forum
A course discussion forum enables the interaction between participants and trainers and facilitates the exchange of experiences as well as possibilities to ask questions or get clarifications.
Final Exam
Passing a final examination is a requirement for obtaining your certificate.
If you do not wish to take the final exam, you will receive a confirmation of course participation after completing the course.
Prof. Dr. Jörg Werner
Prof. Dr. Jörg R. Werner is Professor of Accounting at Frankfurt School of Finance & Management since 2011. His research areas are international and comparative accounting with a particular focus on empirical methods, but also on regulatory issues in accounting and corporate governance. More...
Prof. Dr. Matthias D. Mahlendorf
Prof. Dr. Matthias D. Mahlendorf is Professor of Managerial Accounting at Frankfurt School of Finance & Management. His research areas are performance measurement and relative performance information. More...
Philip Stalter
Philipp Stalter graduated in 2011 with a Bachelor degree from the Baden-Wuerttemberg Cooperative State University Mannheim (Duale Hochschule Baden-Württemberg in Mannheim). He focused on tax law and auditing. In 2013, he started an extra-occupational Master degree with the Frankfurt School in cooperation with the University of applied science Mainz (Hochschule Mainz). Philipp graduated in 2016 and works as a lecturer for the Frankfurt School since then.
From 2011 to 2017, Philipp worked at KPMG in the Financial Services division. He was in charge of the annual audit for clients in the banking sector and other financial services institutions. He gave support to advisory projects as well and was part of the internal training team in the service line audit at KPMG.
Since 2018, Philipp Stalter works with HLB - Foerderer, Keil und Partner (a medium-sized auditing firm) in Germany. As a partner at FKP he is responsible for the audit division and performs annual audits for clients in the industry sector and advises small and medium-sized companies on tax issues. Furthermore, he is head of the audit working group at the HLB network in Germany.
