The CMA Credential and This Independent Course

The Certified Management Accountant (CMA) is a professional credential awarded by the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA), a professional body based in the United States. It is aimed at accountants and finance professionals who work inside organizations: they plan, analyze, control and support decisions, rather than audit from outside.

The CMA exam has two parts. Part 1 is about financial planning, performance and analytics. Part 2, the subject of this course, is called Strategic Financial Management. It asks you to analyze financial statements, make corporate finance decisions, judge business decisions with relevant costs, manage enterprise risk, evaluate capital investments and apply professional ethics.

The companion course for the other part is the IMA CMA Part 1 Exam Preparation course. IMA allows candidates to take the two parts in either order, so you can start with whichever part fits your work and study plan. Confirm this and every other exam rule in the current CMA Handbook before you register.

Who this course is for

This is an advanced course. It assumes that you already know basic financial accounting: how the income statement, balance sheet and statement of cash flows fit together, what accruals are, and how depreciation works. If you need that foundation first, the Financial Statements Explained course covers it.

Each module follows one section of the IMA Part 2 content outline. Each lesson teaches the concept, works at least one example step by step, shows the traps that exam questions like to use, and ends with practice. Every numeric answer in the course has been recomputed independently by a script.

How a CMA thinks

Part 2 is not a test of memory alone. Most questions describe a business situation and ask you to choose the best decision, the correct figure or the right ethical response. The exam rewards three habits: identify what is relevant to the decision, compute it carefully, and judge it in context — risk, strategy and ethics included.