Business Management and Finance

Strong financial management is essential to a prosperous business. By combining management know-how with financial expertise, you’ll be ideally placed to deliver practical business solutions that ensure any organisation fulfils its potential.

By the time you graduate from the BA (Hons) Business Management and Finance, you’ll be taking financial analysis and projections in your stride. You’ll have the specialist skills to assess the financial health of an organisation, control and co-ordinate its financial resources effectively, and help it avoid common pitfalls in performance management. You’ll also have a strong understanding of corporate governance.

Accreditation

We have developed this course in close consultation with the premier professional body for managers, the Chartered Management Institute (CMI). It is one of the few degrees in the country where you can graduate with the CMI Level 5 Diploma in Management and Leadership alongside your degree.

The Diploma is the benchmark qualification for full CMI membership and takes you a step towards Chartered Manager status, signalling to prospective employers that you’re suited for senior leadership roles and rapid promotion. You won’t need to take extra exams or coursework to achieve the Diploma: our combined module and CMI assessments offer a smooth route to both qualifications.

Throughout the degree, you will become an affiliate member of the CMI, at no extra cost, with access to networking events, online resources and additional benefits to support your career development and enhance your employability.

If you aspire to a career with a financial focus, the course also features optional modules offering exemptions from the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA) papers. It gives you a head start if you would like to qualify as a chartered management accountant eventually.

Professional mentoring

Thanks to the CMI accreditation, we can introduce you to a privileged network of contacts. You’ll have the opportunity to be supported by a CMI mentor at every stage of your degree.

Your mentor will be a senior business person, either a Chartered Manager or Fellow of the CMI, with a wealth of experience and insights to share with you. From day one, they will advise and coach you from a business perspective, showing how the management and financial theory you are learning can be applied directly to the workplace.

Hands-on learning

You’ll take the theories off the page and put them into practice in real-world scenarios. You can test your ideas through business simulations, topical case studies and employer-led projects. A live consultancy project, where you help an employer to improve business performance, will build your financial analysis, research, project management, problem-solving and decision-making skills.

We encourage and support you to take an optional placement year or summer internship. You could also benefit from fieldtrips to see business in close-up: one recent example was to the Sony UK Technology Centre, the company’s manufacturing and customer service base in Wales.

Global thinking

Your learning will be enriched by international perspectives. Ours is a global student community and the BA (Hons) Business Management and Finance not only attracts students from all over the world to Derby but is also delivered for our educational partners across Europe and Asia. It means there is a lot of potential for inter-country debates, seminars and guest lectures delivered online, international case studies and joint projects.

In your second year, you’ll have the option to spend an exchange week in Barcelona studying at the EU Business School, one of our academic partners which runs the same degree and where teaching is in English. You could also take advantage of other optional visits overseas: a trip to Copenhagen saw our students investigating issues such as art fraud.  

Expert teaching

You’ll be taught by an experienced and highly qualified team with an impressive track record for research and a national reputation for excellence. The team has extensive contacts in the business and professional community regionally, nationally and internationally – and you can draw on those connections for inspiration and insight.

Select the pathway to suit you

Flexibility is one of the most distinctive features of our Business Management suite of degrees. All students study the same modules in the first year to gain insights into the major business disciplines.

After your first year, you can choose to follow the specialist pathway in Finance or – if you find your interests have changed – you can easily transfer to one of our other pathways in HRM, Marketing, Entrepreneurship, Analytics and Technology, Sustainable Practice or Supply Chain and Logistics.  Alternatively, you could choose the core Business Management route, drawing on our extensive list of optional modules to develop a broader skillset.

This course is also offered as a four year degree to include a placement year. You can, however, study on a three-year full-time basis, with opportunities for internships in the summer breaks. 

Please note that our modules are subject to change - we review the content of our courses regularly, making changes where necessary to improve your experience and graduate prospects.

Our ‘scaffolded’ approach to learning provides a smooth transition so that you can ease your way into both university-level study and business management practice. It means that you’ll have full support in the early stages of the degree but will gradually move towards greater independence as your knowledge deepens and you start to immerse yourself in the wider business community. By stage three, you will be able to take greater charge of your own learning, with module tutors advising and directing your studies.

Thanks to your contact with personal tutors, engagement with CMI mentors and participation in University events, you’ll become more attuned to professional behaviour and build your skills in critical thinking, creativity and self-reliance.

Another of our priorities is to foster a new generation of responsible business leaders with a strong moral compass. Throughout the course, you will therefore look at the role of business in wider society, exploring issues ranging from environmental sustainability to child labour, ethical governance to responsible innovation.

You’ll learn through different methods including:

• formal lectures, sometimes involving guest speakers
• tutor-led and student-led seminars
• one-to-one and small group tutorials
• work experience projects
• work-related learning
• self-directed study
• optional placement and internship opportunities
• video discussions with overseas partner institutions 

How you are assessed

Assessment is mainly via coursework which can take forms such as:

• traditional essays and reports
• group project work
• research and consultancy projects
• presentations
• posters
• design of digital materials
• in-class tests
• computer-based assessments 

Your qualifications will equip you for a rewarding leadership career in any area of business and management, but especially in the field of finance. They will also mark you out as having the potential for rapid promotion to senior positions, someone who can work competently and ethically in global and cross-cultural environments.

Our former students now work in a wide range of companies, including banks such as HSBC and Barclays and chartered accountancy firms such as Shapcotts. Some use the skills and entrepreneurial spirit they develop during their degree to set up their own businesses.

Further study

You can choose to continue your studies at Derby with one of our far-reaching masters programmes, including the MSc Accounting and Finance and the MBA Global Finance. You may be entitled to an alumni discount on your fees if you decide to extend your time with us by progressing from undergraduate to postgraduate study.

2026 entry

These are the typical qualification requirements for September 2026 entry.

Contextual offers may apply to students who meet certain criteria.

Further information about our fees and support you may be entitled to

Additional costs and optional extras

Additional information about your studies

Teaching hours

Like most universities, we operate extended teaching hours at the University of Derby, so contact time with your lecturers and tutors could be anytime between 9am and 9pm. Your timetable will usually be available on the website 24 hours after enrolment on to your course.

Course updates

The information provided on this page is correct at the time of publication but course content, costs and other individual course details do change from time to time and are updated as often as possible, so please do check these pages again when making your final decision to apply for a course. Any updated course details will also be confirmed to you at application, enrolment and in your offer letter.

If you are thinking about transferring onto this course (into the second year for example), you should contact the programme leader for the relevant course information as modules may vary from those shown on this page.