COURSE NUMBER: MBA 224A.2

COURSE TITLE:  Managerial Accounting

UNITS OF CREDIT:  2.0 Units

INSTRUCTOR: Alexander Nezlobin

E-MAIL ADDRESS: nezlobin@berkeley.edu

PREREQUISITE(S): MBA core curriculum

CLASS FORMAT:  Lectures, cases and a project

REQUIRED READINGS:  Text, cases.

BASIS FOR FINAL GRADE:

Class Participation: 15%

Midterm Project: 25%

Cases: 20%

Final: 40%

CAREER FIELD: This course will be particularly useful for those in consulting, corporate finance and general management.

ABSTRACT OF COURSE: The focus of this course is on the use of financial and non-financial information for internal planning, decision-making, and performance evaluation. The first part of the course develops a set of tools for measuring profitability of products, customers, and business units. In the second part, we will explore how these tools can be applied to business planning and decision making. Modern economic complexity requires that owners or top managers of an organization delegate the rights to make critical business decisions to managers at all levels of the organization. In the last part of this course, we will study how to design performance evaluation systems that provide managers with efficient incentives.

Throughout the course, we will notice that many companies do not provide their managers with useful information and proper incentives. We will study a number of pitfalls that such "inefficient" managerial accounting systems can induce and the dangers of using these systems to make business decisions.  We will also investigate some modern ideas in how an organization’s information system should be designed.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH: http://facultybio.haas.berkeley.edu/faculty-list/nezlobin-alexander