Accounting and Finance (Industry) BSc Hons - 2019 Entry

Course Overview

Studying Accounting and Finance at Lancaster provides you with the tools to develop both technical knowledge and a broad understanding of the discipline and its application in the business world. These programmes are accredited by all the major British accountancy bodies, providing graduates with exemptions from many of these bodies’ core examinations.

Your core courses cover Financial and Managerial Accounting, Accounting Information Systems, Finance and Quantitative Methods. You can also focus on your interests with optional modules including Business Law, Taxation and Corporate Finance.

You’ll begin your degree with the Introduction to Accounting and Finance module, plus Principles of Economics and a third subject of your choice.

In your second and final years you’ll study subjects such as Principles of Financial Accounting; Statistical Methods for Business; Bond Markets; and Financial Accounting.

You’ll spend your third year on placement in industry where you will have the opportunity to gain skills and experience which are distinct but complementary to the theory and academic skills obtained in the rest of your degree.

Accreditation

Exemptions

Entry Requirements

Grade Requirements

A Level AAB

GCSE Mathematics grade B or 6, English Language grade B or 6

IELTS 6.5 overall with at least 5.5 in each component. For other English language qualifications we accept, please see our English language requirements webpages.

Other Qualifications

International Baccalaureate 35 points overall with 16 points from the best 3 Higher Level subjects

BTEC Distinction, Distinction, Distinction

We welcome applications from students with a range of alternative UK and international qualifications, including combinations of qualification. Further guidance on admission to the University, including other qualifications that we accept, frequently asked questions and information on applying, can be found on our general admissions webpages.

Contact Admissions Team + 44 (0) 1524 592028 or via ugadmissions@lancaster.ac.uk

Course Structure

Many of Lancaster's degree programmes are flexible, offering students the opportunity to cover a wide selection of subject areas to complement their main specialism. You will be able to study a range of modules, some examples of which are listed below.

Year 1

Core

• Future Global Leaders

  Future Global Leaders is a professional development module taken by all first year LUMS students. The module takes place mainly online and aims to introduce you to key ideas about leadership to help you become future leaders, to enhance your online working skills and to help you develop professional and careers skills which will enhance your employability.

• Introduction to Accounting and Finance

  This course provides a comprehensive introduction to the basic concepts and techniques of Accounting and Finance, which include financial accounting, managerial finance, and financial statement analysis.

  An important element of this course is that it provides exposure to the business and financial environment within which the discipline of Accounting and Finance operates, using real-world financial data for actual companies.

  The course covers concepts, techniques and interpretive skills that relate to the external financial reporting of companies and their relationship to the stock market, and to the use of accounting information for internal management purposes.

• Preparation for Placement

  Your preparation your placement year starts with this module which is delivered by the LUMS Careers Team and invited employers. This module will support you in creating suitable CVs, covering letters, application forms and completing psychometric tests. At the end of the module you will have the opportunity to attend a formal assessment centre and an interview with some of the top graduate recruitment teams in the UK.

• Principles of Economics B

  Providing a thorough introduction to the discipline of Economics, this module is divided into two parts. The first part covers microeconomic analysis, including the theory of demand, costs and pricing under various forms of industrial organisation, and welfare economics. Many applications of theoretical models are examined. The second part focuses on macroeconomic analysis, including national income analysis, monetary theory, business cycles, inflation, unemployment, and the great macroeconomic debates.

• Professional Skills

  This module will provide you with the opportunity to undertake a personal skills audit as part of the CV assignment. It will enable you to identify your current skills level and begin to collect evidence of skills acquisition. It will cover a detailed analysis of the individual in terms of personality, skills, goals, interests and career ideas, and self-development. It would include organisation recruitment processes, including consideration of what organisations are looking for, the nature of ‘transferable skills’ and how these can be developed, and how organisations can select and train people.

Optional

• Quantitative methods for accounting and finance

  Information for this module is currently unavailable.

Year 2

Core

• Accounting Information Systems and Auditing

  This module provides an overview of the design and main features of accounting information systems (AIS). It introduces methods used by business to meet the financial information needs of external parties and management and includes systems used for collecting, recording and storing transactions data, internal controls and effective design of AIS. It also provides an introduction to auditing, including the regulatory framework, audit planning, systems auditing and substantive testing.

• Management Accounting for Business Decisions

  This module provides an introduction to the use of management accounting information for management purposes. This includes an examination of cost-volume profit analysis, the concepts of direct and indirect costs, and various costing methods. The importance of budgets to organisations and their impact on performance are also discussed.

• Principles of Finance

  This module covers project evaluation methods as well as risk, return and the cost of capital, including the capital asset pricing model. Corporate financing, including dividend policy and capital structure, options, and working capital management will also be investigated.

• Principles of Financial Accounting

  This module examines the main features of financial reporting by UK companies as well as the regulatory requirements and conceptual bases associated with these, with attention given to the UK Companies Acts and international accounting standards. Time will also be devoted to inflation accounting, group accounts, and problem areas and to specific reporting topics of current interest and concern.

• Statistical Methods for Business

  At the heart of many real management problems are data that needs to be described, analysed and interpreted. Statistical methods are important across the range of Management School subject areas (e.g. accounting and finance, marketing, economics, operations management and operational research). This module develops your ability to describe, analyse and interpret data soundly, making effective use of computer software.

  Developing these skills will also help you demonstrate to prospective employers that you have practical skills that can immediately be put to good use to solve problems for organisations either in the public or private sector.

  The lecture materials, and the problems you are asked to solve in workshops, reflect the problems that organisations have to solve in practical situations where data analysis skills are required.

Optional

• Advanced Principles of Finance

  This module provides a detailed analysis of three key finance paradigms: decision-making under uncertainty, including utility theory; capital asset pricing and market equilibrium; and option pricing and hedging strategies. Emphasis is placed on financial concepts, theories and models such as portfolio theory, the efficient market hypothesis, and theories of capital structure.

• Business Law I

  Accounting often finds itself perched uneasily between, on the one hand, economics and, on the other, the law. Much of current accounting practice and many reporting standards require accounts to show the ‘economic substance’ of transactions rather than their ‘legal form’. However, every accountant needs to have some understanding of the law: if s/he doesn’t, their careers may be short!

  This second year module (the first of two that, together, are intended to cover the basic accreditation requirements of the professional accountancy bodies) is intended to introduce the area of business law to students of Accounting and Finance. It covers topics such as the nature of the English legal system, the essential elements of contract law, the law of tort and the law of the sale and supply of goods and services

• Techniques for Management Decision Making

  Techniques based on mathematics and statistics can be extremely powerful tools in helping to solve organisational problems and are widely used in practice. This module explains the business situations in which such techniques apply, and shows how to use the techniques and interpret the results to make better business decisions.

  Five such techniques will be covered:

  • Forecasting
  • Simulation
  • Decision analysis
  • Network analysis
  • Linear programming

Year 3

Core

• Dissertation for Accounting and Finance placement students

  The dissertation is an extended academic piece of work which aims to allow students to explore an issue which may arise on their plcement or which they may have become interested in as a result of their academic studies at Lancaster. The specification is deliberately flexible to allow for the varying placement experiences and resulting dissertation ideas which might arise.

Year 4

Core

• Financial Accounting I

  This module deals with accounting for complex entities, addressing concepts, issues and techniques.

  It examines accounting for business combinations, goodwill and strategic investments, and other aspects of consolidation, foreign currency translation, segmental reporting, and accounting for financial instruments, all within the context of modern accounting theory.

• Financial Accounting II

  This module develops your ability to critically evaluate advanced financial accounting issues, placing this within the international accounting context. It focuses on International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), with appropriate and relevant comparisons to US GAAP.

  Other topics covered include the accounting treatments of taxation, leases, pensions, provisions and contingent liabilities. The module also looks at empirical research on issues of relevance to accounting practitioners and accounting regulators.

Optional

• Advanced Management Accounting

  Aiming to extend your understanding of management accounting, this module focuses on both specialised techniques and the particular contexts in which they might be applied.

  In addition to introducing and explaining the use of quantitative methods such as simple and multiple regression, it covers topics such as advanced activity-based costing and customer profitability analysis, pricing for profitability, and flexible and activity-based budgeting.

• Corporate Finance

  This module examines corporate financing and investment decisions, focusing in particular on settings where companies’ assets and liabilities contain embedded options. Topics covered include valuation of options, investment appraisal, valuation of warrants and convertibles, capital structure, and mergers and restructuring.

• Financial Markets

  Fixed income securities are one of the major asset classes, and recent developments in debt markets (bankruptcies and reorganisation of key global players) call for deeper understanding of this key area of the financial spectrum.

  This module develops your intellectual and practical understanding of the organisation and structure of bond markets, introducing you to the main problems and issues relevant in the management of interest rate risk and the principles governing the valuation of fixed income securities and their derivatives.

• Financial Statement Analysis

  This module covers techniques and literature relating to the question of how markets use accounting information. The topics it introduces include the use of accounting numbers in the valuation of businesses, the properties of accounting ratios, accounting quality analysis, prediction of financial distress, relationships between share prices, and accounting numbers.

• International Financial and Risk Management

  This module provides knowledge that is important to those concerned with financial management in a multinational setting. Areas covered include the relationships between exchange rates, interest rates and inflation rates, forward, futures and options markets, and corporate exchange rate risk management.

• Investments

  This module covers the fundamental concepts and techniques of modern investment theory and practice. Topics include security analysis, equity and bond portfolio management, asset allocation, performance evaluation, estimation of risk measures and hedging. There is also an emphasis on some of the practical issues in portfolio management.

• Issues in Auditing

  Information for this module is currently unavailable.

• Professional Ethics

  This module focuses on the various codes of ethics and regulatory frameworks to which professionals in accounting and finance are subject. It examines the nature of ethics and its application in the workplace, looking at various types of ethical issues that may arise. By introducing you to current topics in ethics and governance, the module develops your understanding of the role that governance plays in the management of a business and the evolution of good governance practice, and also your awareness of the consequences of unethical behaviour.

• Professional Financial Analysis

  The main purpose of this module is to give students a thorough grounding in the materials expected of a professional financial analyst and thus prepare students to take the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) Level 1 examination.

  The CFA Level 1 syllabus is wide ranging, covering materials on economics, statistics, financial reporting, various topics in finance and ethics. To cover these in a realistic, professional manner, tuition will be provided by Fitch Learning. Fitch will utilise blended learning combining face-to-face lectures, the use of an on-line portal, self-study with on-line support and a series of mock exams.

  Amongst the areas to be taught on the module are: Portfolio management; Equity market organisation; Equity market indices; Equity analysis and valuation; Fixed income instruments; and Professional Ethics.

• Quantitative Finance

  This module helps you to understand how econometric models can be used to learn about the future behaviour of the prices of financial assets by using information on the history of asset prices and the prices of derivative securities.

  It describes time series models for financial market prices and shows how these models can be applied by banks and investors. It covers random walk tests and forecasting price volatility for financial asset prices.

• Taxation

  This module gives you an understanding of the economic and social impact of taxation and how these impacts influence the formation of tax policy. It covers the basic principles of UK income tax, corporation tax and other taxes, and teaches you the skills needed to perform basic tax computations.

Lancaster University offers a range of programmes, some of which follow a structured study programme, and others which offer the chance for you to devise a more flexible programme. We divide academic study into two sections - Part 1 (Year 1) and Part 2 (Year 2, 3 and sometimes 4). For most programmes Part 1 requires you to study 120 credits spread over at least three modules which, depending upon your programme, will be drawn from one, two or three different academic subjects. A higher degree of specialisation then develops in subsequent years. For more information about our teaching methods at Lancaster visit our Teaching and Learning section.

Information contained on the website with respect to modules is correct at the time of publication, but changes may be necessary, for example as a result of student feedback, Professional Statutory and Regulatory Bodies' (PSRB) requirements, staff changes, and new research.

Careers

All our Accounting and Finance degrees prepare you for a wide variety of careers in business, with many of our graduates working with professional firms and financial institutions, as well as large commercial and local government organisations. Roles include trainee accountants, finance managers and banking advisors.

Your degree will also equip you with highly desirable transferable skills which have helped recent graduates find work in the fields of financial customer service, IT support and marketing and communications. Several graduates have also continued their academic studies and embarked on Masters Degrees. 

Lancaster University is dedicated to ensuring you not only gain a highly reputable degree, but that you also graduate with relevant life and work based skills. We are unique in that every student is eligible to participate in The Lancaster Award which offers you the opportunity to complete key activities such as work experience, employability/career development, campus community and social development. Visit our Employability section for full details.

Lancaster Management School has an award winning careers team to provide a dedicated careers and placement service offering a range of innovative services for management school students. Our high reputation means we attract a wide range of leading global employers to campus offering you the opportunity to interact with graduate recruiters from day 1 of your degree.

Fees and Funding

Fees

Our annual tuition fee is set for a 12-month session, starting in the October of your year of study.

Our Undergraduate Tuition Fees for 2019/20 are:

Tuition fees for programmes are set annually for all new and continuing students. If you are studying on a course of more than one year’s duration, the fees for subsequent years of your programme are likely to increase each year. Such increases are normally calculated based on increases in the costs incurred by the institution, or in relation to UK government regulations which set the maximum fee for certain categories of student.

For the majority of undergraduate students, the most recent annual increase was 2.8%. Any change in fee rates will be communicated to students and applicants prior to the start of the academic year in question, and normally at least eight months prior to enrolment. Further details can be found in our Terms and Conditions.

Channel Islands and the Isle of Man

Some science and medicine courses have higher fees for students from the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man. You can find more details here: Island Students.

Funding

For full details of the University's financial support packages including eligibility criteria, please visit our fees and funding page

Students also need to consider further costs which may include books, stationery, printing, photocopying, binding and general subsistence on trips and visits. Following graduation it may be necessary to take out subscriptions to professional bodies and to buy business attire for job interviews.