1. What is managerial accounting? How is it different from other areas of accounting? Explain the usefulness of managerial accounting for the profession.
Unlike other areas of accounting, managerial accounting is inward facing and feeds information to a company’s managers. Managerial accounting empowers managers with relevant information and figures necessary for planning, controlling, and decision making within organizations. Financial accounting is outward facing and provides financial information and reports to external parties, including stockholders, creditors, and regulators. Due to the different users of financial and managerial accounting, financial accounting is mainly concerned with the financial performance of “past activities, objectivity and verifiability, precision, and companywide performance,” unlike managerial accounting which deals with decisions impacting the “future, relevance, timeliness, and segment performance” (TEXTBOOK, pg 3). While financial accounting is obligatory for external reports and subject to rules, including GAAP and IFRS, managerial accounting is voluntary and does not fall under scrutiny of externally imposed rules.
Managerial accounting is very useful for managers in planning, controlling, and decision making activities. Planning is centralized around creating goals and identifying how to reach them. Managerial accounting information plays a vital role in planning, as a company’s future is heavily influenced by activity estimates and budgets consisting of projected revenues and costs. Controlling activities include obtaining feedback on the company’s operations to make sure the company’s plan is on track or is being modified as needed. For example, this includes managers comparing actual cos...
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...ause it only assigns costs to products that require activity for production. Activity-based costing provides management with easy to understand and analyze information, with benchmarking potential and more detailed overhead costs. It is important to note that these benefits do not come at a small price, which might prove to be difficult for smaller companies with limited funds.
If I were in the position to choose a costing method for my small business which deals with plastic recycling, I would choose the traditional costing method. My business is still small and unfortunately I do not have the luxury to implement a complex costing system, such as the activity-based costing method, at this time. However, I can see the benefit of using the activity-based costing as a supplement to my current traditional costing method as my company grows and my product line expands.
Management accounting in organisation is very important for decision-making and to make the business more efficient and therefore increasing its profits. Is the process of preparing accounts that can help managers to make day-to-day and short-term decisions, by providing them with accurate and timely key financial and statistical information...
Making a good and persuasive argument is very much an acquired skill. It requires much practice and perfecting. It takes more than just having passion and making good points. Just because a person is passionate about the topic or has supporting details does not mean they can make a successful argument. Much more thought and skill is required. Gordon Adams, in his letter to the Arizona State University standards committee, demonstrates this quite well. Gordon Adams writes a passionate argument, yet his argument lacks several critical aspects.
Financial and Managerial accounting are used for making sound financial decisions about an organization. They provide information of past quantitative financial activities and are useful in making future economic decisions. (Albrecht, Stice, Stice, & Skousen, 2002) The same financial data is used to derive reports for each accounting process yet they differ in some ways. Financial accounting primarily provides external reports for external users such as stock holders, creditors, regulating authority and others. (Garrison, Noreen, & Brewer, 2010) On the other hand Managerial accounting is concern with providing information that deals with the internal viability of the organization and is tailored to meet the needs of an individual organization. (Albrecht, Stice, Stice, & Skousen, 2002)
The contained paper has been prepared with objectives of elaborating over the three different costing methods namely, Absorption/Full Costing, Variable/Marginal Costing, and Activity Based accounting. The first segment of the report seeks to define and illustrate the costing methods based on the personal understanding of the writer gained through the class room and the academic readings. Part two of the report takes a form of short essay, written critically to evaluate the application of standard costing and variance analysis to any size of business, and concludes with a verdict that whether or not standard costing and variance analysis is applicable to each business with consideration of its costs and benefits of the system.
On the other hand, managerial accounting is category of accounting that provides special purpose statements, and it reports to management and other persons inside the
The overall purpose of cost accounting is to advise top administration and the management team on the most suitable and cost effective methods and actions to employ based on cost, capability and efficiencies of a given product or service. It can be defined as the method where all the expenditures used during execution of business activities are gathered, categorized, examined and noted down (Horngren & Srikant, 2000). Once these numbers are gathered and recorded the information is used to determine a selling price and/or to identify possible investment opportunities. Although the principal aim or function of cost accounting is to help the business administration with their decision making and business planning process, the cost accounting data
An organization costing system is a system that helps the management with the strategy planning while the system plays an important role in providing accurate cost information about the products and customers (Curtin, 2006). UPS utilizes the Activity-Based Costing (ABC) system. ABC assumes that activities cause costs and that cost objects create the demand for activities (Marx, 2009). The key to cost allocation under ABC is to identify the activities that are performed to provide a particular service and then aggregate the costs of the activities (Gapenski, 2012). This is a marked departure from the practice of sharing overheads costs equally or overheads becoming part of the overall profit-loss estimate instead of component product pricing (Nayab, 2011).
Cost Accounting: Its role and ethical considerations Introduction: Accounting is the process of identifying, measuring, and communicating economic information about an entity for the purpose of making decisions and informed judgements. The major areas of within the accounting are: Financial Accounting, Managerial Accounting/Cost Accounting and Auditing- Public Accounting Managerial accounting is concerned with the use of economic and financial information to plan and control the activities of an entity and to support the management in planning and decision-making process. Cost accounting is the subset of managerial accounting and it helps management in determination and accumulation of product, process or service cost. Role of Cost Accounting: Increased competition and uncertain business conditions have put significant pressure on corporate management to make informed business decisions and maximize their company?s financial performance. In response to this pressure, a range of management accounting tools and techniques has emerged.
Managerial accounting which is a synonym for management accounting refers to the provision of accounting information to the managerial accountants of particular organizations which they will in turn utilize in making informed decisions that touch on the business. This allows them to carry out their control and management duties effectively (Gao, 2002). According to Hall (2010), managerial accounting entails a process of identifying, measuring, accumulating, analyzing, preparing, interpreting and communicating information of accounting information by managers with the aim of assuring appropriate use of available resources and accountability.
Activity-Based Costing ( ABC ) Summary The business environment in the 1990s is markedly different from that of the past when conventional cost accounting procedures were established. Activity-based costing (ABC), pioneered in the late 1980s, offered a new costing approach consistent with the changed environment. However, ABC did not diffuse rapidly into the business community.
...pplied. Cost estimation and analysis could ultimately determine major decisions in both the business and political worlds today, and play a crucial role even in our day to day lives. Through activity based costing one is able to see what areas need improvement and also whether or not a business will be successful after considering all the factors. These tools are very powerful in drawing wise conclusions from cost analysis and can be a priceless tool to have even in the field of engineering.
Besides, an organisation can adopt a technique of activity-based costing (ABC) as an approach to support its sustainability objectives. ABC system is a technique of assigning overhead costs to products and services by identifying the cost drivers. ABC technique will first identify each activity cost that is involved in the process of production, then assign the cost to each product and service on the basis of each activity consumption in the production of each product and service (Drury, 2012, p. 253). ABC system is an effective method to account for costs of products and services. This is because ABC system allocates indirect costs based on a cause-and-effect relationship (Drury, 2012, p. 269). ABC system allocates overhead costs to cost
In Management, the accountant gives advices to the individuals and business people, how to manage their business. The account information is considered and some business decisions are taken in both financial and non-financial departments. Budgeting, tax filing, and financial statements. Other activities like involve in planning com...
In Management Accounting a manager has to have knowledge on both the financial and non-financial terms of the business and operational sides of the business. Both the financial and non-financial items are reported and analyzed by the managers to come to any decision. Again, the corporate social performance is also analyzed and a report is made on that. They have to take care of the other points also, i. e, profit of the organization, the final and end users, i. e ,customers and their satisfaction levels, employees of the organization, environmental matters related to the
Activity-based costing is used as a supplement of traditional cost accounting in a company to support manager in internal decision making. It focus on assigning the indirect cost to direct costs in order to get a more accurate cost on products. Activity-based costing uses several cost pools instead of one in traditional cost accounting. The system is easy to implement and it provides many benefits, it allows the company to respond to inefficiency by reallocating resources to more profitable activity from areas that absorb too many resources. It also allows the company to respond to manufacturing overhead cost and assumes a more accurate selling price on products in order to make more profits. Company that do not have internal expertise to conduct activity-based costing analysis may think to hire one or ask company that provides this kind of services for help.