MSc Accounting & Finance with CIMA

You will study the following modules:

• International Financial Reporting (15 credits): This module seeks to deepen and broaden your ability to prepare, analyse and critically interpret financial statements. It will enable you to explore the principles and theories of international financial reporting and analysis, and introduce you to recent critical debate on the sufficiency of conventional financial accounting practices.
• Finance for Managers (15 credits): This module develops critical understanding of essential management accounting and finance topics within a business environment, to develop high-level understanding of how financial information helps to make informed and accurate management decisions.
• Advanced Management Accounting (15 credits): This module extends the techniques of management accounting in its role in shaping short-term and long-term decision making, in analysis, planning and control. This module also places management accounting techniques within its strategic context to help you understand how you can support the strategic objectives of a business.
• Corporate Financial Management (15 credits): This module is designed to introduce key concepts and principles of modern finance and financial management and apply them to the main decisions faced by financial managers.
• Research Methods: Problems and solutions (20 credits): This module is designed to develop both your theoretical research knowledge, and your practical insights into the purpose, nature, execution, and value of research approaches and how these can be effectively utilised in the solving of problems in the context of academic knowledge creation or organisational professional practice.
• Contemporary Issues in Business and Society (15 credits): This module aims to enable you to reach a well-grounded understanding of the theory and practice of international management and relate it to events taking place at a global and national level. Utilising the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals as a discursive element within the module, the ways in which business can positively contribute to achieving these will be critically evaluated. This module also explores what it is to be a master’s student so that all students enrolled in the course can access this higher level of postgraduate education in an effective manner.
• Data Analytics for Management Decision-Making (15 credits): This module explores the sources of data, how that data is collected, processed, and presented, and then continues the data lifecycle by considering how this is used within informed decision-making processes within contemporary enterprises. With so much data noise, how can businesses be certain that the data they are using is reliable and valid? How can they then link that to a primary function within management and leadership, making decisions? Using case studies, debate and in-class scenario exercises, the module will link data and action in an interesting and informed manner.
• Strategic Management (15 credits): Strategic management concerns itself with assessing what’s important, determining how to get there, and avoiding the potential pitfalls. By focusing on long-term sustainable success, it enables practitioners to avoid the noise of the day-to-day. The module incorporates strategic concepts, tools, and techniques that organisations can employ to assess their environment and resources and make strategic decisions towards long-term success. This is a mandatory module for all the Queen Margaret Business School MSc courses. Much of the knowledge and skills developed in this module are transferrable and useful in a broad range of management functions.

Progressing to an MSc?

If studying for an MSc, you will also complete a capstone module (60 credits). This takes the form of either a 12,000-word Dissertation, a Business Consultancy in Practice project, or a Business Incubation Programme.

Accounting or Finance Dissertation (60 credits): To enable students to develop, plan and critically evaluate a piece of research in the relevant degree subject-related area, written up in the form of a dissertation. This offers the opportunity to conduct a substantial academic research project around a topic of choice.

Business Consultancy in Practice (60 credits): This is a hands-on practical project where you will work with a business on a live project, determine the project parameters, manage the project, and deliver a consultancy report recommending actions the company can implement. The module aims to develop excellent project and client management skills alongside high-level writing skills that include excellent reflective abilities.

The Business Incubation Programme (60 credits): The aim of this module is to critically evaluate a range of nascent, micro and family businesses and to develop, through inception, investigation and planning, a new start-up business or social enterprise of your own design. You will work with mentors, QMU’s Business Innovation Zone (BIZ) and the on-campus Business Gateway to take your business from idea to reality.