FINA1149 Finance for Non-Finance Managers: what do the two reports need?

FINA1149 is assessed by two short reports totalling just 2,000 words, and that constraint is the whole difficulty.

FINA1149 is assessed by two short reports totalling just 2,000 words, and that constraint is the whole difficulty. Students arrive braced for a maths problem and instead face a compression problem: a 500-word report and a 1,500-word report in which every sentence has to earn its place. The module is called Finance for Non-Finance Managers for a reason. It is not testing whether you can produce a set of accounts. It is testing whether you can read one and say what it means. This guide answers the seven questions Vietnamese students at Greenwich ask MAAS mentors most often before they start FINA1149.

Author: MAAS Editorial Team · Reviewed by a Senior Accounting and Finance mentor (PhD, Accounting)
Last updated: 2026-07-29
Category: writing-tips

What is FINA1149 Finance for Non-Finance Managers about?

Direct answer: FINA1149 is a Level 4 module worth 15 credits, taught by the Accounting, Finance and Economics department at Greenwich Business School. It introduces basic concepts in accounting, banking and finance as used in modern organisations, builds your competence in how those concepts appear in the data and statements organisations use to communicate with stakeholders inside and outside the business, and aims to raise your numeracy and your confidence in handling financial information from a non-finance role.

Evidence: The module's published aims name employability directly, describing the goal as enhancing transferable skills for working with financial information in non-finance roles. That framing tells you what kind of answer the assessment wants: not the technically deepest treatment, but the one a manager without a finance background could act on.

Example: A Vietnamese student at Greenwich spent her first three weeks trying to memorise double-entry bookkeeping rules she had found online, convinced the module would test them. Her MAAS mentor read the learning outcomes with her. None of the three asked her to prepare accounts; all three asked her to understand, use and interpret them. She had been revising for a different module.

What assessment does FINA1149 involve?

Direct answer: Two reports. Report 1 is worth 30%, runs to 500 words, addresses one case study scenario, and covers the material from the first five weeks against learning outcome 1. Report 2 is worth 70%, runs to 1,500 words in three sections, works from case study scenarios covering the whole module, and is assessed against all three learning outcomes. Both carry a 40% pass mark. There is also formative work that does not count towards your mark: weekly multiple-choice, true or false and matching questions after each topic, plus in-class case discussions. Confirm the exact briefs and deadlines in your own module handbook.

Evidence: These figures come from the assessment section published in Greenwich's public module catalogue. Note the structure the brief gives you for Report 2: it is explicitly a three-section report. That is not a stylistic suggestion, it is the shape the marker expects, and it maps naturally onto the three learning outcomes.

Example: A student wrote Report 2 as one continuous 1,500-word discussion with no headings. The content was sound. His mentor pointed out that the brief specified three sections and the module has exactly three learning outcomes, so an unsectioned report forces the marker to hunt for evidence against each one. Adding three clear headings, with no change to the words underneath, made the same work far easier to credit.

How is FINA1149 graded, what does the marking reward?

Direct answer: Interpretation, not computation. The learning outcomes ask you to understand the role of the finance function, to understand the role, use and messages communicated by the key financial statements, and to understand the use and importance of management accounting including budgeting and ratios. The recurring verb is "understand", and in a case-based report that means explaining what a number tells a manager and what decision it should influence. A ratio calculated correctly and left unexplained earns very little.

Evidence: Learning outcome 2 uses the phrase "messages communicated by" the financial statements. Statements do not merely contain figures in this framing; they carry a message to stakeholders. An answer that reports a current ratio of 1.4 has extracted a figure. An answer that explains what a current ratio of 1.4 signals about this firm's ability to meet short-term obligations, and what a manager should watch next, has read the message.

Example: A MAAS mentor asked a student to cover the numbers in her draft with her hand and read what remained. Almost nothing did; her report was a table with connecting words. She rewrote so that each figure was followed by a sentence beginning "which means that…". The calculations never changed, but the report moved from a bare pass to a strong mark.

Which concepts and tools should you use in FINA1149?

Direct answer: The module covers a defined set, and you should use them in the order a manager actually would: understand what the statements are, then read them, then look forward with budgets. The table below maps the main tools to the question each one answers.

Tool	Question it answers	Where students go wrong
Profit and loss account	Did the business make a profit over the period?	Confusing profit with cash
Balance sheet	What does the business own and owe at one moment?	Reading it as a period, not a snapshot
Cash flow statement	Where did the cash actually come from and go?	Skipping it because P&L looks healthy
Ratio analysis	How does performance compare over time or to peers?	Calculating many ratios, interpreting none
Budgeting and variance	What did we plan, and why did reality differ?	Describing the budget process instead of using it

Evidence: The indicative content published for this module lists the main financial statements, how they relate to one another, and how they can be used as management data, alongside banking, investments, taxation and VAT, and the company annual report. Note the phrase "how they relate to one another". A profit figure with no cash context, or a balance sheet read without the P&L, misses the relationship the module is built around.

Example: A student concluded that a case company was performing well because its profit had risen year on year. Her mentor asked her to look at the cash flow statement. Operating cash flow had fallen, because the profit rise came from sales made on credit that had not yet been collected. One additional statement reversed her conclusion entirely, and that reversal was exactly what the case was designed to teach.

How should you structure the 1,500-word Report 2?

Direct answer: Follow the three-section instruction and align each section with a learning outcome. A workable allocation: section one, the finance function and the key concepts at work in this scenario, roughly 350 words; section two, what the financial statements say about this business, roughly 600 words; section three, the management accounting view, budgeting, control and ratios, and what the business should do, roughly 500 words. Keep the introduction to two or three sentences. At 1,500 words you cannot afford a warm-up.

Evidence: The published brief describes Report 2 as a three-section report assessed against all three learning outcomes. When a brief names both a section count and an outcome count and they match, that alignment is the safest structural decision available to you.

Example: A student spent 300 of his 1,500 words introducing the case company and explaining what accounting is. His mentor cut both to a total of 60 words. The 240 words freed up went into the ratio interpretation section, which had previously been two sentences long, and that section was where two of the three outcomes were actually demonstrated.

What are the most common mistakes that lose marks in FINA1149?

Direct answer: Six recur across almost every non-specialist finance report.

Mistake	Why it costs marks	The fix
Numbers with no interpretation	Outcomes ask you to understand, not to compute	Follow every figure with "which means that…"
Calculating every ratio you know	Breadth without depth in a 1,500-word limit	Choose three or four ratios that fit the scenario
Ignoring the cash flow statement	Misses the relationship between the statements	Always read profit against cash
Long company background	At 2,000 words total, context is expensive	Two or three sentences maximum
No sections in Report 2	The brief names three; the marker looks for three	Head each section and align it to an outcome
Textbook definitions padding the word count	Definitions are assumed, not credited	Apply the concept to the scenario instead

Evidence: The word limits here are unusually tight, 500 and 1,500 words, and tight limits change what good writing looks like. In a 3,000-word essay a paragraph of background costs you little. In a 500-word report it costs a fifth of your submission.

Example: A student's 500-word Report 1 opened with 120 words defining what a balance sheet is. Her mentor asked who she imagined was reading it. She had been writing to prove she knew the definition; the brief asked her to apply it to a scenario. Deleting the definition and using the space to analyse the scenario doubled the substance of the same submission.

How do you handle the numbers if you are not confident with maths?

Direct answer: The arithmetic in this module is deliberately accessible, and the module aims say so, describing the goal as enhancing numeracy and confidence for people in non-finance roles. Two habits help more than revision: always write the unit and the period next to any figure you use, and always state the comparison. A number alone carries no meaning; a number next to last year's, or next to an industry norm, carries an argument.

Evidence: The module's aims explicitly frame numeracy as a confidence and employability issue rather than a technical hurdle, which is consistent with an assessment design built on short case-based reports rather than on calculation-heavy examinations.

Example: A student told her mentor she was "bad at numbers" and had been avoiding the ratio topic. He asked her to compare two figures from the case and say which was better and why. She did it immediately and correctly. Her difficulty was never arithmetic; it was that nobody had told her the comparison was the answer, and the calculation merely the step before it.

Frequently asked questions

Is FINA1149 hard if I have never studied accounting?
The module is designed for exactly that starting point. The difficulty most students meet is not technical, it is the discipline of writing something useful inside 500 and 1,500 words.

Do I need to prepare financial statements myself?
The learning outcomes ask you to understand their role, use and messages, not to produce them. Reading and interpreting is the assessed skill.

How many ratios should I include in Report 2?
Three or four, chosen because they suit the scenario, each properly interpreted. A long list of correctly calculated ratios with no interpretation demonstrates none of the outcomes.

Does the formative quiz count towards my mark?
No. The weekly multiple-choice, true or false and matching questions are formative, meaning they exist to show you where your understanding is thin while you can still fix it. They are worth doing precisely because they carry no risk.

Can MAAS help me with FINA1149?
MAAS mentors work with you on reading a case scenario, choosing which ratios and statements matter for it, and turning figures into interpretation that a marker can credit. You remain the author of your reports; the mentor's role is to show you where a marker would push back.

Ready to write a FINA1149 report that says something?

The students who do well in this module are not the ones most comfortable with arithmetic. They are the ones who treat every figure as the start of a sentence rather than the end of one, and who respect how little room 2,000 words really gives them. If you can do the calculations but cannot see what to say about them, a MAAS mentor can work through a scenario with you before you write.

Talk to a MAAS mentor about your module

References

Atrill, P. & McLaney, E. (2025). Accounting and finance for non-specialists (13th ed.). Pearson.
Drury, C. (2021). Management and cost accounting (11th ed.). Cengage Learning.
Weetman, P. (2019). Financial and management accounting: An introduction (8th ed.). Pearson.

Tools & resources

University of Greenwich. (n.d.). Course modules. Retrieved July 29, 2026, from https://www.gre.ac.uk/modules
University of Greenwich. (n.d.). Academic skills. Retrieved July 29, 2026, from https://www.gre.ac.uk/students/support/academic-skills

This article is part of the MAAS Journal series for Vietnamese international students. MAAS Academic Mentoring is an advisory partner; we coach students through the Outline → Draft → Final delivery model with developmental feedback from PhD-level mentors. We do not write or submit work on a student's behalf.