Focusing on behavior, insight, and sustainable value

Organizations make financial decisions every day—about prices, investments, compensation, customer propositions, and collaboration between departments. Behind all these choices lie structures: cost allocation systems, internal transfer prices, KPI sets, and compensation mechanisms. If these have grown historically, they can unintentionally create complexity, silos, and perverse incentives: behavior that focuses on optimizing figures rather than customer value and long-term performance.

In the Financial Performance Management master's module, you will examine financial information as a management tool. You will delve into management control systems, cost accounting (including Activity-Based Costing), transfer pricing, working capital management, and performance indicators, and analyze how these tools influence choices and behavior at all levels of the organization. You will learn to look beyond the numbers: what incentives do you build in, what behavior do you encourage, and how does that fit in with the organization's strategy?

You will zoom in on the tension between cost control, remuneration, collaboration, customer value, and social responsibility. Using concepts such as agency theory, you will examine how the interests of management, shareholders, managers, and other stakeholders align—or clash—and what role financial functions play in achieving strategic goals. You will develop language and frameworks to recognize and discuss short-term management, misguided incentives, and suboptimal KPIs.

The module combines robust theory with realistic cases and calculation assignments, such as an ABC case on customer and product returns. You will apply models to your own practice, examine how existing systems work, and design improvement proposals for performance measurement, internal accounting, and remuneration structures. In this way, you will develop into a finance professional who not only reports on performance but also helps to build transparent, fair, and strategically thought-out control mechanisms.

This master's module is bilingual: for each edition, we decide whether the language of instruction will be Dutch or English based on the group.