My name is Konstantin Kontor.
I am director and professor of finance at
the American Institute of Business and Economics in Moscow.
And now, I'm offering to you my course in accounting.
The third course in
the financial series of our specialization understanding more than finance.
Well, strictly speaking, this is not a course in accounting.
You can say, "How come?"
Well, it's rather a set of chapters in accounting that are
instrumental in our proper application of
valuation procedures and value creating strategies.
Well, it seems to be an offensively pragmatic approach.
Well, we pursue it not because we have to
explore the limitless area over a limited amount of time.
Rather, we just pursue a different goal.
As always in this specialization,
we pursue understanding mainly instead of
going deeper in the details of financial procedures and financial statements.
We see how the internal links and the ways these things are being
prepared influence the final result in the valuation of the investment projects.
And on this path,
we identify or discover if you will some interesting things.
First of all, we see that financial accounting allows us to better
forecast the future cash flows and the analysis of financial statements not
only provides data for the inputs and valuation but also
signals some performance trends that sometimes
are even more important than the inputs themselves.
We study managerial accounting and we see that the analysis of costs allows us to better
understand what are the value drivers
that contribute to the utmost value of investment projects.
We also see that managerial accounting studies
the behavior of people who are key in these projects.
And there are certain ways to quantify
these processes and we see that it is the coordination,
communication and some other important areas that allow us to increase the probability
of converting nice forecasts into actual nice bottom line.
As always in my courses,
we focus on what adds value to
your careers both in finance and accounting and well beyond.
And here this is the understanding or the cause and effect links,
these processes of coordination,
this revealing the interaction between people and numbers
that is actually important and instrumental in progress seeing.
As a nice by-product,
most of the things that we study in
managerial accounting can be easily applied in the vast area of
project management not only in budgeting but
also in the implementation and quality control and others.
And we do so without overemphasizing
control over emphasizing control ability if you will without scaring off people.
Instead we get them involved in these processes.
Well, I invite you all into the journey over the land of financial statements,
costs, and budget numbers. Good luck.