Accounting and Finance

3 Credit Hours

This course provides an introduction to financial accounting, with an emphasis on the interpretation of financial statements. The course is not appropriate for students with a significant amount of coursework in accounting at the undergraduate or graduate level. We will learn how financial statements reflect a firm's economic events, and discuss the generally accepted accounting rules for these events, their alternatives, and their limitations. There will be special emphasis on the areas of the financial statements that include significant managerial discretion, because those are the areas that most often result in litigation. Many of the examples we discuss in class will be based on real-world financial statements. By the end of this course, you should be able to read and understand a basic set of financial statements.