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Financial Accounting

As taught in: Fall 2003

Close up of dollar bill with A equals L plus E written on it.

Accountants use the equation Assets = Liabilities + Shareholders' Equity as the basis for their balance sheets. (Image courtesy of Matthew Palmer. Used with permission.)

Instructors:

Prof. George Plesko

Prof. Kin Lo

Prof. Richard Frankel

MIT Course Number:

15.515

Level:

Graduate

Course Features

Course Description

Our goal is to help you develop a framework for understanding financial, managerial, and tax reports. The course goal is divided into five subordinate challenges that can help you organize the way you learn accounting:

  1. The record keeping and reporting challenge
  2. The computation challenge
  3. The judgment challenge
  4. The usage challenge
  5. The search challenge

The course adopts a decision-maker perspective of accounting by emphasizing the relation between accounting data and the underlying economic events generating them. Restricted to first-year Sloan MBA students.

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgment is hereby given to Professor G. Peter Wilson for his authorship of the following content in this course:

  • The Five Challenges (see Syllabus and Lecture 1)
  • "What Do Intel and Accountants Have in Common?" (see Lecture 1)
  • A Conceptual Framework for Financial Accounting (see Lecture 1)