Six modules.
One coherent
body of knowledge.

You won't become an accountant. You will become a manager who knows what the accountants are telling you, and who can read a published set of financial statements with the same confidence you read a market report.

This module sets the foundation that everything else builds on: why we report at all, who reads the numbers, and the accounting equation that underpins every statement you'll ever look at. Skip this and the rest never quite locks in.

The Income Statement is where most managers think the action is — and it is, partly. This module unpacks an IFRS multi-step income statement line by line, so you can read any company's P&L with confidence and explain in plain language what every subtotal actually means.

This is also where the simulation gets real. By Friday, you'll submit your Year 1 decisions — and watch them appear on the very statement you've just learned to read.

If the income statement is the video of how a business got here, the balance sheet is the still frame of where it is. Everything owned, everything owed, and what's left for the owners. One date stamp. Real precision.

You'll also make your first major simulation decisions in this week — and every one of them will appear on next quarter's balance sheet, in a place you can predict in advance.

A profitable company can — and many have — run out of cash and go bankrupt. Bankruptcy is a cash event, not a profit event. The cash flow statement exists for exactly this reason: it strips out the accruals and shows what actually moved.

And in doing so, it reveals how the whole system fits together. Profit flows to equity, cash ties the income statement to the balance sheet, and the equity statement reconciles the owners' stake. Auditors call this articulation — and once you see the four statements as one mechanically interlocked system, you can never unsee it. This is the week most participants describe feeling "the click."

Two analytical toolkits turn statements into decisions. The first is cost behaviour: a business with mostly variable costs scales smoothly, while one with mostly fixed costs has a volatile profit that, past a threshold, drops almost entirely to the bottom line. Separating variable from fixed cost is what drives pricing, volume, and capacity choices.

The second is ratio analysis. A single ratio is rarely useful; ratios become powerful when you compare them — over time, against benchmarks, or across companies. This week standardises the statements so you can benchmark your team against its competitors, and adds the DuPont decomposition that explains why a return on equity is what it is.

Statements and ratios describe the past; capital decisions shape the future. The final week draws everything together into a strategic framework for value creation. Every capital decision a business makes reduces to one of three questions: where to invest, how to fund it, and what to return to owners.

Management creates value only when it invests above the cost of capital and allocates cash to its highest use. This week gives you the toolkit — NPV, IRR, WACC, the capital allocation hierarchy — and then turns four years of simulation evidence into a board-level recommendation. There is no quiz this week: Module 6 is assessed by the final case study instead.