Accounting has always been about analytical thinking. A new skillset that is becoming more important for nearly every aspect of business is that of big data analytics: analysing large amounts of data to find actionable insights. This course is designed to help accounting students develop an analytical mindset and prepare them to use data analytic programming languages like Python and R.

We’ve divided the course into three main sections.

In the first section, we bridge accountancy to analytics. We identify how tasks in the five major subdomains of accounting (i.e., financial, managerial, audit, tax, and systems) have historically required an analytical mindset, and we then explore how those tasks can be completed more effectively and efficiently by using big data analytics.

In the second section of the course, we emphasize the importance of assembling data. Using financial statement data, we explain desirable characteristics of both data and datasets that will lead to effective calculations and visualizations.

In the third, and largest section of the course, we demonstrate and explore how Excel and Tableau can be used to analyze big data.

This course focuses on developing Python skills for assembling business data. It will cover some of the same material from Introduction to Accounting Data Analytics and Visualization, but in a more general purpose programming environment (Jupyter Notebook for Python), rather than in Excel and the Visual Basic Editor. These concepts are taught within the context of one or more accounting data domains (e.g., financial statement data from EDGAR, stock data, loan data, point-of-sale data).

The first half of the course picks up where Introduction to Accounting Data Analytics and Visualization left off: using in an integrated development environment to automate data analytic tasks. We discuss how to manage code and share results within Jupyter Notebook, a popular development environment for data analytic software like Python and R. We then review some fundamental programming skills, such as mathematical operators, functions, conditional statements and loops using Python software.

The second half of the course focuses on assembling data for machine learning purposes. We introduce students to Pandas dataframes and Numpy for structuring and manipulating data. We then analyze the data using visualizations and linear regression. Finally, we explain how to use Python for interacting with SQL data.

This course, Machine Learning for Accounting with Python, introduces machine learning algorithms (models) and their applications in accounting problems. It covers classification, regression, clustering, text analysis, time series analysis. It also discusses model evaluation and model optimization. This course provides an entry point for students to be able to apply proper machine learning models on business related datasets with Python to solve various problems.

Accounting Data Analytics with Python is a prerequisite for this course. This course is running on the same platform (Jupyter Notebook) as that of the prerequisite course. While Accounting Data Analytics with Python covers data understanding and data preparation in the data analytics process, this course covers the next two steps in the process, modeling and model evaluation. Upon completion of the two courses, students should be able to complete an entire data analytics process with Python.

This capstone is the last course in the Data Analytics in Accountancy Specialization. In this capstone course, you are going to take the knowledge and skills you have acquired from the previous courses and apply them to a real-world problem.

You will be provided with a loan dataset from Lending Club which is the largest peer-to-peer lending platform. You will explore the characteristics of the features in the dataset through statistical analysis, exploratory data analysis and visualization. You will also create a machine learning model to predict whether a loan will be fully paid or not. Finally, you will construct a portfolio with the help of your analysis. The goal is to create a portfolio that achieves better return than the overall return of all loans on the Lending Club platform.