Management Accounting
for LeadersCornell

Certificate Program

Organizations are fraught with struggle, often dealing with underperforming employees, disagreements between individuals and departments, unclear chains of responsibility, and general failures to live up to their goals. Fortunately, we all have ready access to a surprising ally to address these challenges: accounting systems.

In this course, you will understand the power of accounting to solve a wide range of managerial problems. You will identify the languages of stewardship and governance, examine the principles of moral accounting, refresh your understanding of double-entry bookkeeping, and explore the realities of human nature. Provided deliberation guides will assist you in a step-by-step method to address conflict, redistribute responsibilities, identify problems in governance, and explore causes for unwanted behavior. Finally, you will practice making recommendations for systems to create organizations that are both productive and moral.

All organizations understand the importance of maximizing revenue while minimizing costs. Yet this goal is only possible if you can accurately determine the margin you can expect on all the outputs you produce. If you're maintaining a factory or office that produces varied goods and services, how much of your overhead should be assigned to each output? What if a single process creates multiple products; how can you really determine the accurate cost of each individual output?

In this course, you will be introduced to techniques that tease apart these complicated situations and determine how much value each output is truly delivering for your organization. You'll explore real-world case studies, investigate qualitative margin analysis, and perform simple job cost allocations. With the aid of the uniquely crafted spreadsheets and deliberation guides, you'll practice analyzing financial data and creating recommendations that can ultimately improve your organization's margins.

The following course is required to be completed before taking this course:

• Improving Governance

Capacity is the volume of product or service output that an organization can create. While investing in capacity is expensive, once purchased, using it is often much cheaper than it seems. To figure out when to invest in capacity, how to use it, and when to leave it idle, you need an understanding of cost accounting to look behind the numbers reported on financial statements.

In this course, you will analyze investment in capacity both quantitatively and qualitatively. You will determine the profitability of investing in new capacity, using existing capacity to take on incremental work, or leaving it idle. Finally, you will apply a significant advance in cost accounting — activity-based costing — which will help you work with customers and suppliers to create more value with less capacity. Along the way, you will utilize unique deliberation guides and spreadsheets to determine the best ways to improve both capacity investment and use and bring valuable skills back to your organization.

The following courses are required to be completed before taking this course:

• Improving Governance
• Improving Margins

Every organization seeks to increase efficiency and coordinate activity between individuals and units, but how can you know how your organization is doing on these fronts? What should your efficiency goals be, and how can you tell whether you are meeting them? And what are effective ways to increase cooperation among those who have conflicting interests and priorities?

In this course, you will be introduced to various methods that help you understand and improve the efficiency of repetitive processes using both qualitative and quantitative analysis. You'll then examine how to effectively develop a budget and discover how doing so can actually improve coordination within and between units in your organization. Specially designed spreadsheets and deliberation guides will give you hands-on practice with standard costing and budgeting to apply to your organization and beyond.

The following courses are required to be completed before taking this course:

• Improving Governance
• Improving Margins
• Improving Capacity Investment and Consumption

How can you point people in the direction you want them to go? How can you best motivate them to continue in that direction? How can you prevent employees from gaming or tilting the accountability system to their advantage? How can you make sure they do what's right for society, not just for the organization?

In this course, you will distill progress toward organizational goals into a Balanced Scorecard and spell out strategies for keeping on track. First, you will explore one of the contentious topics in management: determining compensation. You will then ask the right questions to figure out if people are gaming or tilting the performance measurement system and identify strategies to limit the damage that can cause. Finally, you will evaluate accounting systems under a new assumption — that your client isn't a person, organization, or group of investors, but a society — and tackle the tricky moral issues raised by social accounting. Overall, by the end of this course, you will have honed valuable skills and perspectives to apply in your organization.

The following courses are required to be completed before taking this course:

• Improving Governance
• Improving Margins
• Improving Capacity Investment and Consumption
• Improving Coordination and Efficiency

Because of incredible advancements in computing, artificial intelligence, robotics, and communication, we are in the midst of a Fourth Industrial Revolution. What new possibilities do these advancements open up? How can you use them to improve organizational design while ensuring all involved are still held accountable based on a good account of their performance?

In this course, you will explore a number of these new advances. First, you will examine gamification, which is the application of game design elements and principles to the workplace with the aim of motivating performance. You will reflect on the possibilities and the perils of this approach to improving performance. Next, you will recognize the challenges of holding bots and artificial intelligence accountable for their actions, choices, and speech, and develop approaches to address these challenges. You will then explore outsourcing and remote and distributed workplaces, as well as the accounting possibilities and challenges they present. By the end of this course, you will have a new awareness of some of the key challenges facing the modern workplace.

The following courses are required to be completed before taking this course:

• Improving Governance
• Improving Margins
• Improving Capacity Investment and Consumption
• Improving Coordination and Efficiency
• Improving Direction, Motivation, and Society