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This case presents students with an opportunity to develop a set of performance metrics based on four strategic goal statements. The setting is a highly ranked United States MBA program. Students are given some basic, limited-but-sufficient contextual information about the school to get a sense of its heritage, avowed differentiating characteristics, and important foci.

This material presents students with an opportunity to have another shot at cementing their understanding of the general format of the three basic financial statements, some of the content of those statements, and a few of the basic principles undergirding those statements. The tasks presented in the material are relatively direct and manageable as homework within an hour's time.

"Media General and the Balanced Scorecard (A) " (UV1135) describes the impetus for and the process of implementing a balanced scorecard (BSC) in a large, publicly held, multimedia news organization. The B case (UV1137) presents a situation where a business-unit manager turns to his region's BSC to evaluate the possible reasons for a quarterly revenue shortfall.

"Media General and the Balanced Scorecard (A) " (UV1135) describes the impetus for and the process of implementing a balanced scorecard (BSC) in a large, publicly held, multimedia news organization. The B case (UV1137) presents a situation where a business-unit manager turns to his region's BSC to evaluate the possible reasons for a quarterly revenue shortfall. These cases can be used in an undergraduate, graduate, or executive-education setting to introduce the BSC topic.

This short case challenges students to review a series of corporate financial metrics and to match them to one of the thirteen industries listed for them.

This note provides an overview of intercorporate investments, including passive investments (marketable securities), investments that result in significant influence, and investments that result in control. Then, the accounting for marketable equity and debt securities is described in detail.

This case presents students with an opportunity to develop an action plan for an executive education client program needs analysis. Evergreen Executive Education LLC (EEEL) has just landed a large, new corporate client. The case presents some basic background information pertaining to the client company and their general program needs. Students are expected to create a learning needs analysis plan by merging that background information with their own focused thinking pertaining to how best to uncover and make actionable a corporate learning agenda. The plan should be robust and focused enough to ensure that the insights emerging from its execution will serve as the key inputs in developing a detailed program design. Students are not asked to develop a management education program design.

This case challenges students to apply financial reporting concepts pertaining, most notably, to liabilities and expenses in a specific corporate situation. In the context of an interesting, but noncomplex, technical accounting issue, students debate the best way for Adenosine Therapeutics to present its compensation arrangements in its financial statements. In addition, this case also prompts students to debate the best way for a growing company, with cash constraints, to provide incentive and maintain top employees.

In this case students must ascertain what financial ratios they recommend the company focus on and they must also decide how best to communicate, explain, and bring to life those metrics so that the company's cadre of non-financial middle managers can most easily understand the significance of, and internalize the insights from, those ratios. Embedded in this task, students must: (1) understand the nature of the company insights afforded by each of the potential financial metrics presented; (2) make a judgment as to which subset of financial metrics is (a) most applicable to a group of non- financial middle managers and (b) most representative of bankers' and shareholders' interests; and (3) develop a plan for communicating to a group of non-financial, middle managers the subset of financial metrics they have selected.

This case raises the question: How does a company reasonably estimate and record entries for uncollectible trade receivables, and under what circumstances are receivables written off as uncollectible? The required accounting transactions for the case involve estimating a receivables allowance both as a percentage of sales and as a percentage of accounts receivable and making specific account judgments under the direct write?off method. The subjective issues involve analyzing and assessing a company's methods of collection and accounting for bad debts.

This case provides students with an opportunity to practice a set of activity-based costing calculations. More importantly, it provides an instructor with the opportunity to challenge students to think about and to discuss the rationale used by the case protagonist to revise the means by which the company allocates corporate support costs to the product lines and to the business units. It is best used as an introduction to activity-based costing and/or the more general topic of cost allocations. As such, it is amenable to undergraduate and graduate managerial accounting courses, as well as executive education financial management programs.

This case provides financial ratios and common-size balance sheets for 13 "mystery" companies. Students are asked to match each mystery company's data to one of the 13 industries provided.

This case provides an opportunity for students to (1) understand the calculation of a number of basic financial ratios, (2) analyze a set of common-size balance sheets and several financial ratio metrics, (3) hypothesize how some basic understanding of an industry should be reflected in certain financial indicators, and (4) present to their classmates a rationale for their pairings and to respond to questions from their classmates. If instructors are so inclined, use of this case also provides an opportunity to (1) discuss an organizing framework for the focal ratios, (2) present the concepts of financial leverage and the DuPont ratio model, and (3) introduce students to some of the published sources for industry metrics.

Recently, accountants were instructed by President Bush to get their acts together. Indeed, the Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, and other recent corporate financial reporting failures have prompted a loss of faith in accountants and accounting. To a large extent, this loss of faith involves corporate balance sheets and it is warranted. Corporate managers and shareholders have a vested interest in addressing balance sheet shortcomings. Highlights the pervasive shortcomings of contemporary corporate balance sheets, identifies the underlying foundational tensions creating those shortcomings, offers proposals to address those tensions, and discusses the potential implications of the proposals.

Traditional financial-ratio analysis is a popular after-the-fact look at financial and managerial performance. This case introduces a means for incorporating rates of improvement, growth, or change into traditional financial-ratio analysis. Indeed, the Delta Factor tables presented in the case easily transform financial-ratio analysis into a forward-looking planning tool.

This competitive bidding game consists of four teams, which can be two to four students. (Several games can be played simultaneousely.) Each team runs a printing company that has a capacity of forty press hours a week plus overtime. The case gives budgeted costs, saying which are likely to be variable. Teams bid on lists of jobs and schedule the work they win. Too much work incurs late penalties; two little leaves unused capacity. Four rounds of bidding are scheduled and at the end each team computes its income statement.

The Shun Electronics' KL Radio division wants to expand the three departmental cost centers to eight, each with its own overhead cost allocation rate. As a result, it appears that the total costs for four of their six radios will increase, while two will decrease. The case puts students in the role of having to (a) understand why such a result occurred; (b) explain the specific changes made in the cost allocation system; and (c) evaluate whether the changes are an improvement.

This case presents an opportunity for students to use flexible budgeting to perform a variance analysis on the operating results of EntertainmentNow.com. First, the company's original budget is flexed to account for changes in sales volume. Then, actual results are compared to the flexed budget and analyzed for product mix, price, cost of goods sold, efficiency, and other variances. In addition, the case requires a simple calculation to determine the breakeven level of sales given the company's current variable and fixed costs.

This case provides students with an opportunity to understand how to analyze costs and profit at the service-line level. Students have a chance to allocate general and administrative costs to service lines in a number of different ways and are directed toward considering drivers of overhead expenses in the allocation process. In addition, students should be challenged to discuss whether it even makes sense, in this setting, to allocate all the general and administrative costs. Finally, students are asked to calculate the incremental contribution margin percentage for each service line, and determine which service line(s) Finnegan should try to expand.

This case provides students the opportunity to practice variance analysis for an annual operating plan using flexible budgeting skills. First, a static budget is flexed to account for changes in product volume. Then, actual results are compared to the flexed budget and analyzed for product price, efficiency, and other variances. In addition, the case allows for discussion as to how flexible budgets can be used for management decision making, and how various compensation structures can affect financial results.