Picture of the course instructor

Instructor Introduction

Hi, I'm Dr. Frank Tamberelli and I wanted to take this opportunity to welcome you to this course. I began teaching at the University of Central Florida a few years ago after teaching at colleges in North Carolina for 23 years, and I always look forward to the beginning of a new semester. Regardless of how well you have or have not done in previous semesters, it seems like every new one — and the new courses that go with it — provide for a fresh start. As great as that is, sometimes it can also be a little intimidating: you have to learn a new topic from a new instructor in a new format and so on. I want you to know that you are not alone in this journey. I am here and I'm available to help.

My contact information is in the syllabus as well as at the top of the course information section in Webcourses@UCF. You'll find that one of the best things you can do when you have a problem is seek help. Since our course taught in a remote, synchronous manner you will have many opportunities to contact me if you are having a problem and I strongly encourage you to do so. The only “stupid” question is the one that you wanted to ask, but decided not to ask. So if you do have a question, ask me before, during or after class, by sending me an email, or request a Zoom meeting if that is more convenient, so that we can get answers to all of your questions.

Our classroom time is going to be very interactive and you will all be very busy evaluating different kinds of problems that face businesses each day and working with your teammates on developing and defending a solution. This is not a lecture course; we will learn by doing and communicating our results.

Working together, we can have a great semester. I know I am looking forward to it and I hope you are too.

Course Introduction

The Small Business Accounting & Finance course is designed to show you all of the different ways that the finance function impacts every aspect of a business's operations. Yes, we will learn about the three most important financial statements, how to read them and what they mean, but more importantly we are going to learn a few of the financial ratios that are really important tools for business managers to measure the "health" of the company and apply those tools in analyzing the financial statements to learn how the business is really performing. We are also going to cover a number of related topics that impact a company's financial well-being, such as inventory management, managing accounts receivables and payables to improve the all important cash flow, and how to manage our relationships with our suppliers. We are going to leverage the finance function's importance and provide you with several different views of day to day issues facing business owners and managers so that you can understand how a financial event (like selling a product or ordering more inventory or equipment) can impact a company in a number of ways. You will also be participating in a business simulation in which your team will make decisions involved in running a company and you will be competing with the other teams in the class in this very comprehensive exercise that is very close to the real world of business.

Getting Started Assignments

It's very important that you get off to a good start and to do that, I encourage you to take the following actions:

Read the Course Syllabus
Review Knights Online
Access Help resources

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