Coffee Anyone? An Unstructured Capital Budgeting Project To Encourage Critical Thinking Skills In Accounting Students

Abstract

This paper presents an unstructured, semester-long team-based capital budgeting project for senior level undergraduate accounting students. Successfully completing this project requires accounting students to step outside of their narrow accounting transactions framework and to apply extensive organizational, analytical, information gathering, and critical thinking skills. Specifically, this project requires students to assess a market opportunity, define the scope of their analysis, and to structure their own business solution to the problem. Students are then required to collect external data with which to project annual after-tax net income, after-tax cash flows, and the associated performance measures. Based on their financial analysis, students must subsequently assess the viability of their solution and reach a “go” or “no-go” decision.