I developed these free browser tools for my master's course in Financial Decision Making and Control at Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University. They help students practice how to use accounting information for planning, business decisions and performance evaluation.
The practice lab offers numerical exercises on the course topics listed below. Companion tools visualize Monte Carlo simulation and the simplex algorithm, so students can see how uncertainty affects profit and how limited resources shape a production decision.
The lab generates fresh numerical questions at different difficulty levels and checks your answers. Hints and worked solutions explain the calculations.
Practice topics include:
Profit planning: break-even analysis and profit targets.
Costing and allocation: job and process costing, activity-based and time-driven costing, reciprocal service allocation and joint costs.
Operating decisions: special orders, make or buy, further processing and product mix with limited capacity.
Investment appraisal: project cash flows and net present value.
Budgeting and control: flexible budgets, sales variances, and labor and material input variances.
Performance measurement: return on investment and residual income.
Your progress stays in your browser. You can export it to keep a copy. The lab is a beta version, so please report errors to skramer@rsm.nl.
See how the simplex algorithm chooses a production mix within capacity and demand limits. The aim is to maximize contribution margin, the sales revenue left after variable costs. Each step updates the graph and the calculation table, or tableau, together. Change the inputs or generate fresh numbers to explore another production decision.
Explore Monte Carlo simulation through a marketing campaign with uncertain sales responses. Repeated random draws build a distribution of the change in monthly profit. The charts show the range of outcomes and their probabilities, with an exact model result available for comparison.
