The course aims to provide students with an introductory and applied overview of how a company operates and is managed, integrating concepts from external, management, and environmental accounting.
At end of the course, students will be able to read and discuss a company’s financial statement (both traditional and sustainability-related), identify different cost types and manage their allocation process to determine product full cost. They will also be able to apply the knowledge acquired to support short-term business decisions (e.g., break-even analysis) and long-term decisions (e.g., investment evaluation). Particular emphasis will be devoted to the environmental dimension of the company and on tools such as sustainability accounting, life cycle costing, and environmental costing.
No specific prerequisites needed.
The course is organized into frontal lectures and exercise sessions. During lectures, the fundamentals of the discipline will be presented. The exercises will instead be aimed at developing practical skills. During the course, particular effort would devoted to stimulate class debates and direct dialogue with the students, who are invited to formulate proposals for discussion during the lessons. Meetings with practitioners holding sustainability-related roles within companies may also be organized during the course.
The final assessment consists of a written exam and includes numerical exercises and questions covering the theoretical aspects of the course. Students obtaining a sufficient score in the written exam (at least 18/30) can directly register the grade achieved. The oral exam is optional for students who have achieved at least 18/30 in the written exam. The oral exam consists of a new evaluation of the entire course content. In the case of passing the oral exam (at least 18/30), the final evaluation will be attributed as the arithmetic average of the written test and the oral exam. If the oral exam is not passed, the student will be required to retake the entire exam.
The course is structured into three thematic units, preceded by an introductory module on the company and its operational context.
1. EXTERNAL ACCOUNTING
Company financial statements: purpose, characteristics, structure, accounting principles, and tools for financial statement analysis. Introduction to environmental accounting and sustainability reporting.
2. MANAGEMENT ACCOUNTING
Structure, classification, and measurement of company and product/service costs. Short-term business decisions: break-even analysis and optimal product mix. Fundamentals of cost allocation. Cost evaluation over the entire life cycle (life cycle costing) and environmental costing.
3. INVESTMENT EVALUATION
Definition and types of investments. Analysis of net cash flows and criteria for the evaluation of independent and mutually exclusive projects. Trade-offs between the economic-financial dimensions of an investment and its environmental impacts. Managing uncertainty in investment evaluation.
The exam rules are the same for both attending and non-attending students. If the course will be taught remotely, or according to a blend-teaching mode, changes the syllabus can be implemented to accommodate the change in teaching modality.
