C214 Financial Management, catalog number FINC 6000, is the three-CU graduate finance course in the WGU MBA. It covers analysis and decision making about corporate funds: capital budgeting, working capital management and the cost of capital. Where the accounting core teaches you to read what a business already did, C214 teaches you to price what it is about to do, and to defend the price in front of people who will have to fund it.
The three questions FINC 6000 keeps asking
Graduate financial management is smaller than it looks. Behind every case, every spreadsheet and every scored aspect are three questions that never change.
Should we do this project? That is capital budgeting: net present value, internal rate of return, payback and their discontents. The examinable insight is that these measures disagree, and that when they disagree net present value wins because it measures value created in dollars rather than a rate that ignores scale.
What does our money cost? That is the cost of capital: the weighted blend of what lenders charge and what shareholders demand, and the reason a project earning nine percent inside a firm whose capital costs eleven destroys value while looking profitable on an income statement.
Can we get through next month? That is working capital: receivables, payables, inventory and the cash conversion cycle, the plumbing that turns a profitable firm into an insolvent one when it is neglected.
A graduate finance task nearly always sits on one of those three, and the strongest submissions say which one out loud in the first paragraph. Papers that stay ambiguous about the question tend to answer all three shallowly, and shallow is the state that gets returned.
Building the section plan from the aspects you are scored on
Open the rubric in your Course of Study before you open a spreadsheet. Each scored aspect is judged on its own three-point scale and each needs a 2 to pass, so the aspect list is not guidance, it is the specification of the document.
A finance-flavoured word budget. Suppose your rubric lists five scored aspects and the directions ask for eight to ten pages, call it 2,600 words of body. Finance tasks carry exhibits, so subtract nothing for tables but do reserve 250 words for the executive summary that decision makers read first. That leaves 2,350 across five aspects, or roughly 470 words each.
Now weight it the way finance is actually scored. The aspect that asks you to compute and compare investment criteria deserves 600, because it has to show the method, the result and the disagreement between measures. The aspect that asks you to recommend deserves 550, because a recommendation carrying no sensitivity discussion is a guess. The remaining three share 1,200, or 400 each. The total still lands at 2,350, and the paper now front-loads effort where returns come from.
Write the headings from the rubric's own nouns. If an aspect speaks of the weighted average cost of capital, your heading says weighted average cost of capital, not a cleverer phrase. Evaluators scoring by aspect should never have to hunt.
A structure that fits a corporate finance recommendation
Finance deliverables read as investment recommendations. The house style below suits capital budgeting, financing and working capital tasks alike, and defers to your task directions wherever they specify their own headings.
| Section | Contents | Common scoring trap |
|---|---|---|
| Executive summary | The decision, the recommended action, the headline number and the main risk, in under 250 words | Writing it as an introduction rather than as a conclusion, so the reader reaches page six before learning the answer |
| Situation and assumptions | Firm, project, horizon, discount rate, tax rate and every assumption you will rely on later | Assumptions used in the model but never disclosed, which makes the computation aspect unverifiable |
| Method | Which criteria you applied and why those criteria suit this decision | Listing formulas rather than justifying selection |
| Computation and exhibits | Cash flows laid out by period, discounting shown, results tabulated | Presenting a single summary figure with no visible cash flow schedule behind it |
| Comparison and conflict | Where the criteria agree, where they disagree, and which one governs here | Ignoring the disagreement, which is usually the exact thing the aspect was written to detect |
| Risk and sensitivity | What happens to the answer if the discount rate, volume or price moves | One sentence of generic risk language with no rerun of the numbers |
| Recommendation and next steps | Do it or do not, funded how, with the trigger that would change the answer | Recommending further study, which reads as declining to answer |
Sensitivity work is the cheapest quality signal in finance writing. Rerunning a net present value at two alternative discount rates costs ten minutes and turns a flat answer into an argument with a range around it.
Sourcing and citation in graduate finance work
Finance evidence divides into three kinds and each has its own handling.
- Given data. Figures the task supplies. Repeat them in a labelled table before you use them, so the evaluator can check your inputs without reopening the case file.
- Derived data. Anything you computed. Show the formula once, the substitution once, and the result in a table. Derived numbers with no visible derivation are the top cause of returns on computation aspects.
- External data. Market rates, industry betas, benchmark ratios. These need real citations with a retrieval date, because a risk-free rate is only true on a day.
Two conventions worth adopting for the rest of the degree. First, state the currency, the units and the sign convention once, near the top, then never vary: cash outflows negative, inflows positive, everything in thousands. Second, never present a percentage without saying what it is a percentage of. A return of eighteen percent is meaningless until the reader knows whether that is annual, project life or on equity.
Use APA formatting for external sources and cite anything you did not compute. WGU checks submissions for similarity, so the safe practice in finance is to quote almost nothing: definitions of standard measures should be written in your own words, which also happens to be what an evaluator is looking for when judging whether you understand the measure.
What earns Competent here, and what sends the task back
Graduate finance aspects are scored for whether a numerate reader could reproduce and challenge your work. Passing submissions share a small set of qualities.
- The cash flow schedule is visible by period, including the initial outlay and any terminal value, so the discounting can be checked.
- The discount rate is justified rather than assumed, and the justification connects to the firm's capital structure.
- Where two criteria disagree, the paper names the disagreement and explains which governs and why.
- The recommendation names an amount, a funding route and a monitoring trigger.
- Risk is quantified at least once. Naming a risk is description; repricing under it is analysis.
Returned work usually fails on one of two things: an unstated assumption that makes the model unverifiable, or a recommendation that restates the computation instead of deciding. Neither is a knowledge gap and both are fixable in an afternoon, which is why the revision route at WGU matters. Performance assessments can be revised and resubmitted without any grade penalty, so a return costs queue time rather than standing.
If your version of this course carries a proctored objective assessment, that portion is preparation only on our side. We build the study plan, drill time value of money mechanics until they are automatic, and tell you honestly whether to book the sitting. We never sit an assessment for a student and never touch portal credentials.
Five mistakes that cost finance students a term
- Discounting with the wrong rate. Using the cost of debt, or a rate pulled from the case's narrative rather than computed, quietly breaks every downstream number in the paper.
- Forgetting that depreciation is not a cash flow. The tax shield is real, the expense is not cash, and mixing the two is the classic capital budgeting error in graduate work.
- Treating sunk costs as relevant. Money already spent belongs in the narrative and never in the cash flow schedule. Evaluators look for this specifically.
- Confusing working capital with cash. Releasing working capital at project end is a real inflow and is left out of roughly half of first drafts.
- Answering with a rate when the question asked for value. Internal rate of return is seductive and ignores scale, which is why a mutually exclusive choice decided on it alone gets returned.
How we work this course with you
Send the rubric and the task directions from your Course of Study, plus the case data if the task supplies any. What comes back is a draft built aspect by aspect with a visible cash flow schedule, a stated assumption set, sensitivity reruns and a recommendation that commits, together with a walkthrough that explains the model so you can defend every cell of it.
C214 pairs naturally with the accounting core, and clients who run C213 and this course in the same stretch of a term tend to finish both faster than either alone, because the statement literacy from one feeds the modelling in the other. At a flat six-month graduate term, two courses closed in one month is the whole argument for supported study.
Questions students ask about C214
Is C214 the same thing as FINC 6000?
How much math does C214 need?
Will you write my assessment for me?
Stuck on a capital budgeting task?
Send the rubric, the directions and any case data. You get a modelled draft with the cash flow schedule visible and every assumption stated.
Where C214 sits in WGU's programs
The July 2026 catalog places this code in 3 current WGU programs. Open a program page for the complete standard path and term positions. The live Degree Plan remains authoritative after transfer credit, substitutions, and mentor planning.
The assessments, one by one
The public catalog does not publish this course's PA/OA identity or task count. WGU Tutors publishes at most one PA manual per course and only from a WGU-controlled public rubric. Until that source exists, PA help begins from the student's real Course of Study and OA support remains preparation only.