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Learner Reviews & Feedback for Introduction to Financial Accounting by University of Pennsylvania

4.7
stars
8,045 ratings

About the Course

Master the technical skills needed to analyze financial statements and disclosures for use in financial analysis, and learn how accounting standards and managerial incentives affect the financial reporting process. By the end of this course, you’ll be able to read the three most common financial statements: the income statement, balance sheet, and statement of cash flows. Then you can apply these skills to a real-world business challenge as part of the Wharton Business Foundations Specialization....

Top reviews

EY

Sep 19, 2019

The course is very easy to understand, and most importantly it is fun to learn accounting! I find this course covers basic yet comprehensive contents compared to other basic accounting online courses.

YR

Jun 13, 2022

It is a great course for beginers like me to start to learn about accounting. The concepts are easy to understand, and the examples are very helpful for understanding. I like the virtual students btw.

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1626 - 1650 of 1,887 Reviews for Introduction to Financial Accounting

By Sarah S

•

Jun 15, 2017

The teacher is absolutely terrific. I really loved how he thinks out questions and is very thorough. He is amazing. However, I felt like the statement of cash flow part was a little confusing. Also, I felt like there could have been more examples during the lesson like what was in the final exam where it actually walked through fixing mistakes and knowing how to detect errors. I struggled with understanding those questions because I don't remember going through many examples like that during the lessons.

By David A K

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Nov 6, 2021

I am very much impressed about the way the instructors taught the course. The only problem is that we the student's don't have the luxury of asking questions. I strongly believe the knowledge acquired will go a long way to help me prepare and understand financial statements, income statements, cashflows and the general performance of my own little data analysis and data programming company that I have established. Thanks to my instructors and the general coursera community. I am most grateful.

By Smita S

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Nov 27, 2016

I enjoyed the hands on examples. For someone like me with absolutely zero background in accounting, the examples provided a good way to truly grasp the concepts. While I don't anticipate actively using any accounting methods in my own career, I believe this course gave me an intro on how to gauge a company's growth and performance based on some standard financial metrics. I'll admit the starting was hard but by the end of the course, I was able to understand more and more of the material.

By Benjamin P

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Jul 7, 2020

A straightforward intro course on the rather intimidating subject of reading financial statements and accrual accounting. You will come away from this with better ability to speak financial language and be able to understand to a degree how financials work in businesses. It gives you the fundamentals to then learn further about analysis of business. If you plan to start your own business, this definitely gives a good portrait or the importance of responsible accounting practices.

By Patrick Y

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May 14, 2017

The professor was very funny and his virtual students kept me interested when I started to fall asleep from all of the formulas. I have a good high level understanding of accounting now, but if I was asked specific questions about formulas we covered I would not know them off the top of my head. This is more because there were so many of them rather than the professor not explaining them well enough. However, I have the PDF notes from each week so I can always pull those up!

By Abraham J V H

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Dec 21, 2015

An awesome course, as an economist I handle the basics of corporate finance and investments, however, felt like reinforcing the finance foundations and couldn't find a better course than introduction to financial accounting to do that.

Professor Bushee designed this course flawlessly as it is intuitive to understand what he's trying to explain in each session. Also he's got a great sense of humor which makes a quantitative course like this a lot less boring.

Congratulations!!

By Nicole C B

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Oct 31, 2021

It is a very comprehensive discussion of financial accounting basics and cycle. However, I most recommend this if you're living in the USA. As someone living outside of the USA, Isome of the accounting methods and account titles were quite different from what has been taught in my school. Nevertheless, this is a great course for those who want to learn and understand more about financial accounting. Thank you to Professor Brian and the people who prepared this course!

By Anand K

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Mar 20, 2019

Overall the course was really good. Given the subject, I was expecting the videos to be dry and boring. But Professor Brian manages to keep the sessions light and funny. There is a good mix of theory and practical examples using the case studies. This helped me to solidify my knowledge and apply it against real use cases. I also found the tests at the end of each week to be adequately challenging ie not too easy and not too hard. Great job putting up this course.

By Jordan C

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Jun 15, 2022

I wanted to leave my review since it might help to hear from someone who's never really ventured into the bussiness world. As a higschool student I found the course very easy to manage and the lessons constanlty engaging. While it's only my first course on accounting it covered all I needed to know and more. The only drawback of the course for me were the vocbulary terms related to bussiness(most were covered) which i'd never heard of. Hope this helps!

By My T

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Dec 26, 2020

Thank you, teacher Brian J Bushee

You have been a great teacher, very humorous, always try to lessen the boredom for us while learning this difficult subject. However, the Final exam part 2 didn't have explanation/reference for right or wrong answers. It is crucially important for us to get to understand Financial Accounting in depth. I hope this opinion is noticed so other students can have better understanding learning this course with you!

By Savvas P

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Oct 22, 2019

Very good course for an introduction to financial accounting.

Most of the basics are covered from the professor in a course of 4 weeks.

The homework/quiz for each week was really good. Only drawback is that you cannot contact the professor. For any questions you have to post in the forum and hope that someone will reply.

Recommended for anyone who feels that needs to revise the basics of Financial Accounting quickly or start from scratch!

By Kulwinder R

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Apr 15, 2017

The course material is very well designed to suit the needs of anyone who does not come from a finance background. I would recommend this course to anyone who is just about to begin his journey on the path of financial accounting. Professor Bushee explains all the elementary concepts very effectively.

I faced a lot of server related issues while pursuing this course. Hopefully that will not affect any other courses I take in the future.

By Anna D G

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Dec 22, 2016

Everything in this course was new to me, since I've never had anything to do with accounting before; in the beginning it was pretty comprehensible, all new terminology was explained,; but in week 4 I felt completely lost- I wasn't sure what we were working on anymore. Anyways, I just wanted to discover if accounting would be something that would interest me- I don't think so now :) But I did enjoy learning new things.

Best,

Anna

By Marcos P

•

Aug 2, 2017

Awesome course. The professor did an excellent work keeping the engagement high and explained the key concepts very well.

The only thing I didn't like was how fast week 4 went. The leap was huge and there weren't enough explanations to understand how the professor came up with some numbers (unlike what happened in earlier weeks, when there were many clarifications and more examples). Aside from that, I'd recommend taking it.

By Andres T

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Nov 15, 2016

Professor Brian Bushee is definitely hilarious with his lowkey jokes and virtual students, but he approaches the theoretical side way too abstractly (only terms and straight formulas), all in a row, making it significantly hard to understand or even memorize what he is trying to teach. Tons of exercises partially make up for it, but I would enjoy better if his slides weren't basically composed of terms and definitions.

By Hernando E

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Apr 15, 2020

Professor Bushee's presence on camera and instruction style were very good.

As a complete beginner in the field, the content of weeks 3 and 4 was a bit excessive and presented too rapidly

Would prefer more detailed feedback (specifically recommended areas of study) in response to failed quizzes.

Overall an informative (but difficult) course that confirmed my long-standing belief that I have little aptitude for accounting

By Mariam M

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Dec 4, 2016

A great course for someone (such as myself) who has next to no knowledge of finance and accounting. I was looking to be able to generally make sense of company financial reports, and that's exactly what I gained from this course. It became a tad more technical than I needed it to be in weeks 3 and 4, but don't let that put you off. It's worth the extra effort (and a couple of failed first attempts at quizzes) to pass.

By MOHAMMAD S K

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Jul 2, 2020

I was new this financial accounting thing. The initial concepts of accounting are very important to understand whole chapters and Those concepts need to be covered in detail and in a simple manner. The way of teaching was great and having a word problem practice quiz as homework would have helped more with detailed answers. At the end a great professor with great knowledge and great teaching. Glad to be part of it.

By Rohan P

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Oct 10, 2020

Aside from the annoying cartoons and their fake computerized voices that were extremely distracting, the course was challenging and the quizzes helped reinforce the material. If the cartoons were sparsely used, it would've been okay, but they were a constant source of annoyance. But the syllabus was solid and the course was very practical in nature, which helped me understand the fundamentals of this subject.

By Soyoung P

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Feb 27, 2016

It was a really great course! The lectures were high-quality, to-the-point. and very enjoyable. I wish there had been a bit more opportunities to practice the calculations, though. The first couple weeks were perfect because the instructor provided plenty of exercises, but the other two weeks did not have as many of those, and I'm worried that I won't be able to retain the knowledge without the practice.

By Paul D

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Nov 22, 2015

I feel like I am really learning a lot about a topic I've always considered to be pretty difficult. Professor Bushee does a good job of communicating the concepts and the way they fit together. His approach has helped me develop a confident grasp of the fundamentals--which is saying a lot since I've tried to make sense of this material before but have never quite gotten my head around it in the past.

By AMAN R I 2 B

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Jun 29, 2020

The explanations can be a bit more introductory in nature. As I already had experience in accountancy, I could keep with the course, but it felt like as an introductory course, there should be more explanation orientation towards making it even simpler. The variety of topics and the depth was brilliant and very useful. The ratio analysis using various Financial Reporting Statements seems very useful.

By Julieta V

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Jun 11, 2020

In terms of content, very good course. I think it can be updated regarding tools and perhaps a different way of delivering the information. I liked the cases, and how each topic was addressed and shown with an specific example. I didn't find very useful the questions in the final exam, though I had to re do it, and that is something that I'm not used to, I didn't enjoy the type of questions.

By Francois R

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Nov 30, 2015

Very clear, organised, and entertaining course. Professor Bushee (and his tech team) did a great job. Some non-graded practice exercises could be provided to the students as a form of training prior to the different tests. I would suggest the following number of non-graded exercise sets per week: 2 easy (2 x 10 questions) + 2 medium (2 x 10 questions) + 2 hard (2 x 10 questions).

By John M

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Jan 5, 2021

Not enough homework or explanation of homework problems to prepare you for final exam and make sure you fully understand all concepts. More practice problems with better explanations when you answer a question incorrectly would be a great plus. While the instructor says no accounting textbook is necessary, that seems to be the only way to get more practice with the concepts.