Free online coursePrinciples of Managerial Accounting

Course Description

Principles of Managerial Accounting is a free online course in Business and Marketing that builds practical accounting skills for planning, control, and decision-making inside an organization. It clarifies how managerial accounting differs from financial accounting and shows how internal reports support managers across operations, marketing, and strategy.

You will explore core cost concepts from product versus period costs and inventory accounts to cost of goods manufactured and the language used to describe costs. The course explains how costs move through job costing and process costing systems, including tracking materials, labor, and manufacturing overhead, along with handling over- or under-allocated overhead and equivalent units.

To improve accuracy in overhead allocation, the course covers activity-based costing from plant-wide and departmental rates through activity-based rates, cost hierarchy, and activity-based management. You will also learn cost behavior analysis using cost equations, scatter plots, high-low method, and regression, then connect these insights to contribution margin income statements.

Cost-volume-profit analysis is presented for break-even and target income planning, including multi-product scenarios, sensitivity analysis, margin of safety, and operating leverage. Budgeting concepts progress through the master budget, covering sales, production, materials, labor, overhead, operating expenses, cash collections and payments, and cash budgeting, culminating in budgeted financial statements and capital expenditure planning.

The course also addresses performance evaluation through responsibility centers, operational decision-making, balanced scorecards, and key financial analysis measures such as return on equity, return on sales, asset turnover, and residual income. Finally, you will apply managerial accounting to short-term decisions like pricing, special orders, discontinuation, product mix, outsourcing, and process-further choices, then move into capital budgeting with payback, time value of money, present and future value tools, net present value, internal rate of return, and profitability index, with an introduction to sustainability in business.