Master of Professional Accounting (Advanced)

This subject covers the nature, role and benefits of information systems in business and how it can assist in management decision-making. Focus is given in the Accounting Information Systems. The business processes, internal controls, and auditing of accounting information systems, ethics and cybercrime are also explored.

This subject introduces students to accounting systems and processes, leading to an understanding of how financial transactions are recorded and reported. The subject involves the preparation of different forms of financial statements and the interpretation of financial statements.

This subject introduces students to a range of financial decisions that management make and various types of information required for internal decision making and for evaluating outcomes of decisions. Students will learn how to apply finance theory and techniques to solve major financial problems. The subject covers topics on goals and governance of the firm, time value of money and its application in valuation, risk and return, capital budgeting, capital structure and cost of capital, working capital management and payout policy.

This subject expands on the financial accounting concepts and practices introduced in Accounting Fundamentals and develops skills in computerised accounting. It also introduces the regulatory environment for financial reporting in Australia, the purpose and interpretation of accounting standards, and application to non-current assets, liabilities, revenue the issue of shares and debentures and cash flow statements.

This subject covers the role of statistical analysis in decision making for accounting and finance professionals. It is divided into descriptive and inferential statistics. Students will learn about statistical techniques for the quantitative evaluation of data in decision making for accounting, finance and business applications. Students will develop analytical and statistical skills through Excel data analysis to manipulate data into meaningful information for the purpose of decision making. Students will also learn to interpret statistical results and communicate their statistical analysis in business reports.

Topics covered include: Qualitative techniques for data collection and investigation, Descriptive statistics including graphical and numerical presentation of data, Inferential statistics including probability theory, probability distributions, sampling distributions and parameter estimation; hypotheses testing; simple and multiple linear regression and correlation; time-series analysis and forecasting for cross section and longitudinal data; index numbers.

This subject provides an introduction to the Australian legal system and general legal knowledge with respect to the creation, operation and discharge of contracts. The methods by which a business may be carried on are examined including companies. The role and application of the Corporations Act 2001 (Cwlth), the regulatory environment for companies in Australia, the procedures for starting, operating and winding up a company are also covered.

This subject involves the critical evaluation and application of accounting standards and covers the theoretical principles and concepts underlying accounting practice. The focus is on the conceptual framework of accounting and its application to contemporary accounting practice. It includes a critical review of current national and international developments in accounting and financial reporting. It also provides the opportunity for students to apply research skills to this cohesive body of knowledge.

Business leaders are expected to make considered and rational decisions that take cognisance of the complex competitive and often volatile environment in which they operate. This course explains the micro and macroeconomic context needed for making these decisions. It also outlines how institutions, particularly the government and regulatory authorities, shape and constrain that environment. By the end of the course, students will be able to use economic theories to help them make decisions about the optimal allocation of business resources and to understand the potential impact of regulatory and economy-wide changes to their business environments.

This subject covers the application of numerical and analytical skills to budgeting and forecasting, product and service costing, planning and control, performance evaluation, and the management of working capital. It also introduces the role and purpose of strategic management accounting and will include a discussion of accounting systems and their application in preparing internal financial reports.

This subject will expand on financial accounting concepts and focus on accounting and reporting issues for corporate entities operating within Australian, using the Australian Accounting Standards. This will include the accounting for a group of companies operating under common control including the tax effects required on consolidation. This subject also examines joint venture accounting and segment reporting by diversified entities.

This subject provides an overview of the fundamental rules and principles of the Australian taxation law and its application to individuals and businesses operating within Australia. Students will learn about the principals underlying taxation of individuals including assessable income concept, the role of deductions and tax offsets when determining tax, taxation of capital gains, tax impact of salary packaging and termination payments. The taxation of entities, partnerships, companies and trusts introduces students to the key features of each structure and to the tax treatment of each entity and their associated entities. The subject will also address other taxes impacting financial advice such as fridge benefits tax, goods and services tax and taxation aspects of superannuation law.

The Code of Ethics and professional responsibilities placed on tax agents and financial advisers providing taxation advice in Australia are also discussed. Students will learn how to distinguish between tax planning, tax evasion and tax avoidance. Students will collaborate with their peers on researching and interpreting more complex taxation topics, tax planning and developing comprehensive client solutions.

This subject introduces students to auditing and assurance concepts and practice. Ethical pronouncements and Auditing Standards that apply to Australian auditors are studied and applied to authentic scenarios. The entire audit process from gathering an understanding of the client's operations and risks, planning and then executing an audit and reporting on the findings are covered both in theory and practice.

This course provides students with a grounding in the principles of project management, its methods and contemporary standards associated with managing diverse projects. Students in this course are introduced to the knowledge, tools, and techniques needed to manage projects (including IT projects) successfully throughout a project life cycle, and to the language used by practitioners in conjunction with the terminology recognised by the Project Management Institute (PMI). Students explore the project management knowledge areas and process groups of the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBoK) guide. Students also examine the ways these two dimensions of project management interact in initiating (scoping), planning, executing (launching), monitoring and controlling, and closing a project. The subject provides students with opportunities to also examine the challenges of project management and the professional traits that project managers are associated with.

In this subject, students learn the integrative nature of project management and develop skills to coordinate the various project management processes and activities. Students formulate appropriate project life cycle and apply the PMBOK (PMI, 2017) project management process groups to their selected case study. They update the project management plan and other artefacts impacted by the change management process. Students evaluate enterprise environmental factors influencing project outcomes and develop effective management strategies. They apply a range of tools to realise and cultivate benefits for the project and organisation, and establish communication strategies to engage relevant stakeholders.

To be effective, project managers must understand relationships between operational factors and projects. In this subject, students learn about scope, time and cost planning, developing an appropriate work breakdown structure (WBS). Students will also learn about the importance of managing project change, quality and risk, as well as the role of effective stakeholder communications in achieving successful project outcomes. They engage in practical exercises designed to help them develop project management skills. Students also examine planning considerations associated with global projects.

In this subject, students will examine how to monitor and control project execution (including IT projects), by implementing a project plan and managing progress by applying performance reporting, analysis, and measurement techniques to ensure that activities are executed as planned. This will include responding to risk events and issues; managing scope changes; communicating with team members and stakeholders; acceptance of deliverables, and administrative and financial closure.

Procurement and contracts are integral to successful project management. In this course, students learn about planning for purchases and acquisitions, requests for proposal, vendor selection, contract administration, and contract closure. Students learn how to approach key issues with regard to short and long‐term contracts, and small and large contracts. Topics covered include the examination of procurement strategies, responsiveness, and supplier‐client relationships. Students will also examine tendering, bidding and order management processes, relevant legal and commercial implications, as well as managing the relationship between buyer and seller, assessing vendor performance, contract change control, and conflict resolution.

This subject consolidates your knowledge of project and program management concepts and introduces Project Portfolio Management. Specific topics include portfolio management lifecycles and frameworks, capability and capacity, project management maturity and change management. You will discuss the influence of the PMO in the successful delivery of projects and programs within the Project Portfolio.

You will also learn to select projects for inclusion in the portfolio and assess and evaluate the performance of the portfolio of projects and programs. Lastly there will be a focus on how to apply a range of tools and techniques when managing project portfolios, specifically considering strategic management, and benefits to the organisation.

One role of the project manager is to lead teams in complex and diverse organisational settings while concurrently communicating with all stakeholders. In this course, students examine how to support and motivate team members to perform to the best of their ability, producing quality results within the required time and cost limits, and how individual and group behaviour impacts organisational effectiveness. Students learn ways to design projects to support organisational goals and how to build and engage organisational capital (intellectual, human, physical, financial, and structural). They also assess communications management as a tool to manage internal and external relationships with stakeholders, partners, vendors, and customers.

This subject introduces students to the key concepts and technologies of information systems that drive change and support organisations to achieve strategic goals. This includes data and information management, application of business information systems, disruptive technologies and issues such as ethics, privacy and cyber security. This subject will prepare students to better understand the technologies that are disrupting and transforming society both now and into the future.

This subject introduces students to programming as a tool for developing systems and addressing business needs. Students will learn Unified Modelling Language (UML) and Integrated Development Environment (IDE) to design, create, compile, test and run programs, applying object-oriented concepts to construct classes and methods to solve organisational problems. This subject will be tailored to student’s levels of expertise and expose students to an object-oriented programming language(s). Furthermore, it will equip students with the skills to assess and apply requirements in business environments.

Students will learn the importance of data to an organisation and the problems inherent in creating, storing, and managing that data. This subject will explore relational database design and modelling and students will learn how to handle data anomalies and the process of data integration. During this unit you will explore an organisation’s need for a data warehouse, learn about data visualisation and evaluate dashboard designs to view data. Students will examine the need for distributed data in today’s business environment.

Requirements management is a method of defining, using, modelling, documenting, maintaining, and measuring requirements throughout the software process. This helps developers explore requirements management and how it supports systems engineering and software engineering life cycles. Develop techniques for eliciting requirements and identifying good requirements. Represent requirements graphically by utilising powerful unified modelling language (UML) diagramming techniques. Develop skills to effectively manage requirements changes and techniques for measuring requirement quality through quantitative metrics.

This subject introduces students to activities, techniques, and methodologies a systems analyst uses to design information systems that, when built, enhance the organisation’s ability to meet its business goals via available technology. These include define requirements for system, model high-level behaviours of system, and design blueprint, that is, planning and implementation and will move through object-oriented approaches to analysis and design, the transformation of user requirements to system design. User empathy is promoted in this subject, using the unified modelling language (UML).

Information is a vital organisational asset. Information systems store, process and exchange information, and most economic sectors are dependent on electronic and automated systems. Interconnectivity is important for many organisations, but this also increases the exposure to adverse events, necessitating the need for thorough information security management. This subject builds upon fundamental information security concepts, including the management of information systems that affect organisational information security: identity management, authentication, access control, monitoring, risk management, incident response and disaster recovery. Since cybersecurity is everyone’s responsibility, having the basic knowledge to prevent attacks, mitigate risk, and get up to speed with best practice cyber governance is an essential ingredient to succeed in today’s digital world.

Progressing from traditional project management frameworks this subject focuses on Agile project management, Agile project management methodology, the principles of Agile, and Agile techniques. This subject will be based on a foundation of the 4 core values and 12 guiding principles of Agile as laid out by the agile manifesto. Students will develop an understanding of Agile concepts, tools and techniques: Scrum and Kanban, Roadmap planning, Program increments, Sprints and daily scrums and the Agile roles within teams. Some of the leading Agile frameworks will be discussed so that students have an understanding of some of the different philosophies, which support the Agile continuous delivery pipeline. Points of origin in Lean practice and the relationship between Agile and DevOps will also be covered to help students orient themselves in the broader emerging landscape of projects and software development landscape.

This subject teaches students techniques and best practices in collecting, storing, cleaning, manipulating, analysing, extracting, and visualising useful information from large, structured, semi-structured, or unstructured data sets, which are critical for organisational decisions. Students will also learn applications of big data management and analytics across industry sectors such as segmentation and prediction, churn prediction, recommender systems and targeted marketing, sentiment analysis, operational analytics, and ethical considerations.

Leadership in modern organisations is a way of thinking and behaving.  It is not necessarily a position in a hierarchy.  Leadership is a process of energising, influencing and motivating others: up, down, sideways and diagonally.  Becoming an effective leader requires self-awareness, self-management and a strong set of interpersonal communication skills, a set of capabilities that are often described as Emotional Intelligence (EQ).  In addition, effective leaders think and act strategically, they build a climate for creativity and innovation, and are culturally sensitive and comfortable with ambiguity. 

This subject focuses on developing your leadership capability and not leadership as a theoretical concept that applies to other people.  It helps you explore your own leadership development and self-image, using the techniques of reflective research and supported by a mentoring partner.  It guides you through the preparation of plan for your continued leadership and professional development that is consistent with your personal values, anchored by the academic literature and enables you to be authentic, confident and resilient in leading productive work places for the future.

Dynamic Leadership provides learning at the cognitive or intellectual level and at the affective or emotional level.  It develops explicit knowledge of leadership (know-what) and the often-neglected tacit knowledge (know-how).

This subject seeks to build the knowledge, skills and attitudes required to succeed as an ethical entrepreneur or entrepreneur. These knowledge and skills are then applied to identify and evaluate innovative high-growth product and service opportunities in the context of a start-up, a corporation, a not for profit or a government institution. The subject allows students to practice skills, including creativity, cash-flow modelling, business model analysis and lean experimentation. Students prepare a business plan for a new venture, or an improvement to an existing enterprise, enabling them to integrate their theoretical and practical knowledge.

Managing information systems is critical in business decision-making. Using a systems perspective, in this subject you will explore the role of information systems in the business administration context, the impact of technological innovation on the management of information, and the risks associated with poor information management.