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Faculty of Management, Economics and Social SciencesChair of Financial Accounting

Treuhandseminar - Professorship for Financial Accounting

The chair of Financial Accounting and the professorship

The professorship has its roots in the beginnings of business management research at the beginning of the 20th century. Accounting was one of the first subject areas of business education at the Cologne School of Commerce, which was founded in 1901 and from which the Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences at the University of Cologne emerged in 1919. The professorship for Financial Accounting goes back to the Treuhandseminar founded by Eugen Schmalenbach. The term ‘Treuhandseminar’ is derived from the separation of the business disciplines of trust management, commercial management and banking operations initiated by Schmalenbach in 1925/1926. Schmalenbach had already taught the subjects of accounting theory, cost accounting and chart of accounts at the Cologne Graduate School of Management. Schmalenbach's student Hans Münstermann was later appointed director of the department until 1968. From 1970, Günter Sieben was director of the department, followed by Christoph Kuhner from 2000 to 2020. Maximilian Müller has held the Chair of Financial Accounting since June 2022.

 

Target group

Students aspiring to a career as an auditor or tax consultant will have an obvious interest in the professorship's courses.
However, the subject's target group does not only consist of prospective auditors and tax consultants: the professorship is also intended to offer an attractive range of courses for those who are aiming to work in corporate finance, management consultancy, investment banking or elsewhere in the financial sector, where they will be entrusted with preparing, analysing and auditing company information.
Finally, traditional interested parties are also fellow students whose future place of work is to be found in the accounting, controlling, auditing and investor relations departments of large and medium-sized companies.

 

Philosophy

  • The core components of the teaching cycle are issues of external accounting for individual companies and groups, problems of auditing and analysing annual financial statements and procedures for determining the overall value of companies.
  • The professional profile of the auditing professions is increasingly characterised by the role of contact partner and service provider for the international capital market. For this reason, particular attention is paid to communicating and analysing company information on the capital market. For the same reason, international accounting is a focal point of the programme.
  • While traditional corporate transparency has so far mainly focussed on financial issues, reliable sustainability information is becoming increasingly relevant to society. We are supporting this fundamental transformation in close dialogue with practitioners through forward-looking teaching and cutting-edge research.
  • Events organised by and with lecturers from the field have a firm place in the curriculum. However, it is not the intention of the professorship to offer pre-vocational training in the sense of imparting vocational skills as a substitute or flanking training on the job.
  • Rather, the focus is on the theoretical penetration of practically relevant issues and the teaching of scientific concepts and methods that can be operationalised for practical applications.