Introducing your course
Find out what it's like to study Accounting and Management at Lancaster University Management School.
11th for Accounting and Finance in the UK
QS World University Rankings (2023)
13th for Accounting and Finance
The Guardian University Guide (2024)
15th for Accounting and Finance
The Times and Sunday Times Good University Guide (2024)
BSc Accounting and Management (Industry) teaches the technical skills of accounting alongside competencies in Management within a 4-year career-focused degree programme that includes a 12-month paid industry placement in year 3. To see how well Management and Accounting work together, look at the backgrounds of the CEOS of the FTSE100 index of firms: fully 1/3rd are certified chartered accountants. This programme allows you to choose management-related modules from across the Management School and wider University giving you a final degree that you build around your interests and strengths. Students graduate from this programme with the combination of technical skills and practical experience necessary to take on challenging management roles. (It is also quite common for students to receive a job offer from their placement host.)
You will learn from leading academic researchers and expert practitioners in accounting, management and associated fields of human resource management and marketing.
In your first year, you study accounting and finance using real-world data from actual companies. You will learn about economic issues such as inflation, supply and demand, cost and pricing.
All second-year students study auditing, financial accounting, finance, management accounting and statistical analysis. Other options include law and subjects from at least two other Management School departments, for example, Management Science, Marketing, or Economics.
Your third-year industrial placement provides you with a positive, practical experience in a graduate role, gaining priceless business skills. You will have the chance to see how well academic theories work in real-life situations, and gain insight into where your talents and interests lie for your future career.
Your final year builds on this knowledge and experience, while offering specialist options such as ethics, investments and taxation. Throughout, you learn from academics whose global perspectives inform government and regulators, and from practitioners with experience of running businesses and working in accounting and finance.
Throughout, you learn from academics whose global perspectives inform government and regulators, and from practitioners with experience of running businesses and working in accounting and management.
The degree is accredited by globally-recognised accountancy bodies:
These accreditations provide graduates with exemptions from many core professional examinations, depending on your module choices, and means, on graduation, you will be further along the route to qualifying as an accountant than many of your contemporaries.
The University will make all reasonable efforts to support you in finding a suitable placement for your studies. While a placement role may not be available in a field or organisation directly related to your studies or career aspirations, all roles offer valuable experience of working at graduate level, gaining a range of professional skills.
If you are unsuccessful in securing a suitable placement, you will be able to transfer to the equivalent non-placement degree scheme and would continue with your studies at Lancaster, finishing your degree after your third year. The University offers a range of shorter placement and internship opportunities for which you would be welcome to apply.
Specialist accounting and finance careers events put you in contact with potential employers, and our expert careers team help you develop practical skills and assets highly valued in the world of work. Modules prepare you for interviews and assessment centres, build your CV and make you attractive to potential employees, placing you in a strong position to start your future career.
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. Many of our graduates also continue their academic studies and embark on Master's 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 one of your degree.
A level AAB
GCSE Mathematics grade B or 6 (Applicants with a GCSE Maths grade 5 considered on a case-by-case basis), English Language grade C or 4
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 web pages.
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 web pages.
Contact Admissions Team + 44 (0) 1524 592028 or via ugadmissions@lancaster.ac.uk
Lancaster University offers a range of programmes, some of which follow a structured study programme, and some which offer the chance for you to devise a more flexible programme to complement your main specialism.
Information contained on the website with respect to modules is correct at the time of publication, and the University will make every reasonable effort to offer modules as advertised. In some cases changes may be necessary and may result in some combinations being unavailable, for example as a result of student feedback, timetabling, Professional Statutory and Regulatory Bodies' (PSRB) requirements, staff changes and new research. Not all optional modules are available every year.
This full-year module is a self-contained introduction to Economics, and can be taken by students both with and without prior knowledge of the subject. It is divided into three parts. The first part provides a thorough introduction to Microeconomics (including the theory of demand, costs and pricing under various forms of market structure, and welfare economics). The second part provides a thorough introduction to Macroeconomics (including national income analysis, monetary theory, business cycles, inflation, unemployment, and the great macroeconomic debates).
The third part of the module, taught in parallel with the first two parts, first covers the key mathematical tools required for a good understanding of Economics (including linear and nonlinear equations, and differentiation), and then shows how the key Micro- and Macroeconomics ideas can help us understand the world around us. In this part, you will participate in economic experiments involving games with and without strategic behaviour. We will also discuss the lessons from the Great Depression and the Great Recession, speculative attacks and currency crises, inequality, democracy and growth, government deficits and inflation, and the macroeconomic implications of Brexit and Covid-19.
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.
During this Preparation for Placement module, you will learn about the competitive recruitment processes in the UK and the skills and expertise employers expect you to evidence; how to produce excellent CVs and cover letters; how to make an impact on application forms, what to expect at interviews and assessment centres.
You will get to hear from final year students about their placement experience and a chance for you to learn about the placement opportunities on offer from graduate employers. You will be offered the opportunity to experience a mock interview with a real employer and attend a mock assessment centre. You will be shown the range of resources and support we offer in LUMS Careers and how that will continue throughout the placement programme, in order to seek a suitable year in industry placement.
Students compete with others nationally to secure placements and we also offer exclusive opportunities with employers, however, we cannot guarantee that all students will progress on to a year in industry placement.
This non-credit-bearing 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.
The key aim of this module is to equip you with essential mathematical and statistical skills relevant to the disciplines of accounting and finance. The module aims to prepare you for more quantitatively-focused subjects offered across the whole suite of Accounting and Finance undergraduate programmes.
This is a 40-credit module that spans across three semesters. In Michaelmas term, you will cover the topics in mathematics such as functions, differentiation, integration, matrix algebra. In Lent term, the module will introduce the basic statistics. You will learn some of the features of the financial data, the rules of probability and hypothesis testing. In Summer term, the module will introduce financial markets with some emphasis on risk, efficiency and operation.
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, explaining why audit independence is a key factor in this profession. The module also examines some specific topics in auditing and relates these to the AIS syllabus, including materiality, going concern and the formulation of audit opinions.
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.
This module covers project evaluation methods, risk, return and the cost of capital (including the capital asset pricing model), corporate financing (including dividend policy and capital structure) and an introduction to options.
This module examines some of the main features of financial reporting by UK companies, the associated regulatory requirements and the conceptual bases of these (UK Companies Acts and international accounting standards). Also examined are specific reporting topics of current interest and concern, including the basics of consolidated accounting.
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.
The dissertation is an extended academic piece of work that aims to allow students to explore an issue that may arise on their placement 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.
This module aims to extend students’ understanding of management accounting, focusing on three distinct approaches to the discipline: conceptual, practical and applied. The conceptual material in the course will seek to develop critical thinking skills for students by inviting them to consider the wide range of philosophical and economic theories that fit with the management accounting paradigm. The practical element of the course will introduce students to new management accounting techniques, including the role of uncertainty in management accounting, management control systems and the use of transfer pricing. The applied material will centre on a series of case study classes in which students will be required to engage with case study material and articulate their ideas about how to help the case organisation solve the particular problems that it faces.
This course equips students with the knowledge to apply corporate finance theory to real-world situations. It builds on and extends the concepts covered in the basic financial management courses and introduces advanced topics in Corporate Finance. The major topics covered include capital budgeting, capital structure, corporate valuation, real options, equity financing for startups, IPOs, leasing, short term financing, merger and acquisitions, and corporate governance
This module deals with accounting for complex entities, addressing concepts, issues and techniques.
It examines accounting for business combinations, goodwill and strategic investments (associates and joint ventures), and other aspects of consolidation, foreign currency translation, accounting for leases, all within the context of modern accounting theory.
This module develops students' critical evaluation of advanced financial accounting issues and places this within the international accounting context. Topics covered include the accounting treatments of taxation, pensions and share-based payments. The module also introduces theoretical foundations and empirical research on issues of relevance to accounting practitioners and accounting regulators in topic areas such as earnings management, building on and extending the basics introduced in other modules
This module investigates the role of ethics in business life. The course looks at this topic from multiple perspectives, considering various theories and models that help to unpack both individual and corporate ethics. The syllabus includes stakeholder analysis and management, corporate social responsibility, different forms of ethical reporting, various codes of governance and conduct, and some ethics-related aspects of UK law.
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.
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 2024/25 are:
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£9,250 | £24,475 |
There may be extra costs related to your course for items such as books, stationery, printing, photocopying, binding and general subsistence on trips and visits. Following graduation, you may need to pay a subscription to a professional body for some chosen careers.
Specific additional costs for studying at Lancaster are listed below.
Lancaster is proud to be one of only a handful of UK universities to have a collegiate system. Every student belongs to a college, and all students pay a small college membership fee which supports the running of college events and activities. Students on some distance-learning courses are not liable to pay a college fee.
For students starting in 2023 and 2024, the fee is £40 for undergraduates and research students and £15 for students on one-year courses. Fees for students starting in 2025 have not yet been set.
To support your studies, you will also require access to a computer, along with reliable internet access. You will be able to access a range of software and services from a Windows, Mac, Chromebook or Linux device. For certain degree programmes, you may need a specific device, or we may provide you with a laptop and appropriate software - details of which will be available on relevant programme pages. A dedicated IT support helpdesk is available in the event of any problems.
The University provides limited financial support to assist students who do not have the required IT equipment or broadband support in place.
In addition to travel and accommodation costs, while you are studying abroad, you will need to have a passport and, depending on the country, there may be other costs such as travel documents (e.g. VISA or work permit) and any tests and vaccines that are required at the time of travel. Some countries may require proof of funds.
In addition to possible commuting costs during your placement, you may need to buy clothing that is suitable for your workplace and you may have accommodation costs. Depending on the employer and your job, you may have other costs such as copies of personal documents required by your employer for example.
The fee that you pay will depend on whether you are considered to be a home or international student. Read more about how we assign your fee status.
Fees are set by the UK Government annually, and subsequent years' fees may be subject to increases. Read more about fees in subsequent years.
You will be automatically considered for our main scholarships and bursaries when you apply, so there's nothing extra that you need to do.
You may be eligible for the following funding opportunities, depending on your fee status:
Unfortunately no scholarships and bursaries match your selection, but there are more listed on scholarships and bursaries page.
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We also have other, more specialised scholarships and bursaries - such as those for students from specific countries.
Browse Lancaster University's scholarships and bursaries.
The information on this site relates primarily to 2024/2025 entry to the University and every effort has been taken to ensure the information is correct at the time of publication.
The University will use all reasonable effort to deliver the courses as described, but the University reserves the right to make changes to advertised courses. In exceptional circumstances that are beyond the University’s reasonable control (Force Majeure Events), we may need to amend the programmes and provision advertised. In this event, the University will take reasonable steps to minimise the disruption to your studies. If a course is withdrawn or if there are any fundamental changes to your course, we will give you reasonable notice and you will be entitled to request that you are considered for an alternative course or withdraw your application. You are advised to revisit our website for up-to-date course information before you submit your application.
More information on limits to the University’s liability can be found in our legal information.
We believe in the importance of a strong and productive partnership between our students and staff. In order to ensure your time at Lancaster is a positive experience we have worked with the Students’ Union to articulate this relationship and the standards to which the University and its students aspire. View our Charter and other policies.
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