Though taking multiple courses as the teaching role in a department, I am always making efforts to weaken the boundary among different courses, e.g. financial accounting, management accounting and corporate finance. It is interesting nowadays that people are building up very clear boundaries between different areas, especially for the field of financial and management accounting, they are indeed overlapped gradually as quite a few concepts and instruments are adopted universally and are widely accepted in both sides.
My course takes the demand of information as the principle for my courses. In management accounting, I start with an introduction (or review) of accounting information demands as well as qualities, which are commonly discussed in the course of financial accounting. It will then continue with a discussion on specified demands of accounting information for insiders, for pricing decisions and for evaluation purpose, which can hardly be satisfied with a formatted report, and where the demand of management accounting sits on.
My philosophy about universal accounting is also reflected in the course of financial analysis, which aims at providing students a framework of fundamental analysis, where both financial and non-financial information are considered. Besides common issues that are solved in the course, e.g. ratio analysis, accounting choices, the course also cares about the linkage of internal decision-making and its externally measured performance. Such linkage puts the knowledge of management accounting, where a series of measurement that optimizes the firm operation is discussed, that of corporate finance, where financing and investment activities of a firm is referred to, and that of financial accounting, where a benchmark of accounting-based performance is provided.
In addition, the era of technology development with the popularity of big data analytics and of artificial intelligence also calls for a refocus on management accounting in all aspects. Given that simply repeated works, including book-keeping, preparing of financial reports, and even conventional analysis, can be settled by machine, it requires an adjustment on both the focus and the scope of teaching in accounting toward innovative work, where management accounting plays important roles. The understanding was shared when I had been invited as a keynote speaker at the annual congress of the Asia-pacific region for Kreston International Association, a cross-country accounting firm association headquartered in the United Kingdom. And that also explains why I am seeking for an academic member of CIMA and why that I involve quite a few management accounting knowledge into other courses that I am teaching.