Talk:Management accounting
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[edit] Proposed merge with Cost Accounting
A merge seems to have been proposed, so here's a place to discuss it. Please sign your votes/comments with ~~~~
- Keep the pages separate - the two disciplines are distinct. Cost accounting, as the name implies, is an occupation involved with the estimation of the cost of making a particular item. Management accounting, whilst sometimes drawing upon some of the techniques of cost accounting, is more broad and focuses on management decision making. 203.129.42.204
- Conditional Support - the management accouting article isn't as neat and tidy as the cost accounting article... however, if we merged them, we should merge them into management accounting. My rationale is drawn from this quote from "Accounging for non-accounting students" by J.R.Dyson:
However, as the century developed, accountants were called upon to supply managers with accounting and cost information for some additional purposes. These included for planning and control, and information for decision-making. Such functions meant that cost accounting had increased its boundaries and was no longer confined to dealing with historical data. Planning and decision-making, for example, promarily looks towards the future while cost accounting is based very much on the past. The term 'cost accounting' was, therefore, no longer appropriate to describe a much wider range of functions and the much broader description of 'management accounting' has taken its place. Hence cost accounting is now regarded as being merely a branch of management accounting
- Keep the pages separate - The cost accouting article is good and should stand alone. The management accounting article, I'd agree, isn't especially neat and tidy - and should be expanded to cover more of the other aspects of management accounting (performance reporting, budgeting, etc.). I'll try to add some material.
SN14534, Oct 26 2005
Keep the pages separate. Managerial accounting or management accounting is broader than cost accounting although some older texts like Horngren, Dater & Foster cling to the old term of cost accounting. Managerial accounting should be at the top of the hierarch and cost accounting (pure) one of its three branches. The material below that has been removed really is off topic and belongs under internal control to which the links correctly point one. MVB Dec 14 2005
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- Management accounting and Cost accounting are two separate and distinct accounting specialization. While there are some overlapping functions in both practices, management accounting has a broader sense because it involves forecasting and feasiblity studies, the use of statistical measurements to compute for future values and the confidentiality of the reports, which are only available for top management. Cost accounting, on the other hand, focuses more on the manufacturing industry and the proper valuation and reporting of its production. Modelwatcher 09:16, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
I have removed:
RECENT EVENTS
Since 2002, the global step of reduction of costs and optimization of resources became a legal constraint, an obligation for all the highly-rated corporations or unquoted in the stock exchange.
Everything began with the law SARBANNES-OXLEY in the United States in 2002 who returned compulsory internal control. From 2003, Canada and European Economic Community took measures aiming at identical objectives:
1- The realization and optimization of the operations of reduction of costs and management of the performance;
2- The reliability of the financial information of costs and performances;
3- Correspondence to laws and to current regulations, notably standards of management of the quality;
4- The implementation of the rules of good governance “to play collective” :
-Every individual member of the company contributes to his level of responsibility in the internal control;
-The responsibilities of the staff of frame vary according to hierarchical levels;
- The general manager assures ultimate responsibility; he is responsible for the system of internal control;
-The directors of the various units are responsible for the internal control bound to the objectives of this one;
-The financial executives and their teams play a role of dominating piloting: they follow and analyze performances, by report not only in objectives bound to financial information, but also to those bound to the operations of the company and to the legal obligations.
These measures which impose the internal coherence as base of the management put company in front of a major technological challenge: the integration of their system of internal control.
Internal control directed towards “realization and optimization of the operations of reduction of costs and management of the performance" gets organized indeed around the notion of inductors of costs, the unforeseen phenomenon, the abnormality or the dysfunction which provokes an increase of costs. By opposition the inductor of activity is the event which activates the activity of the company.
To understand difficulty recovering, it is necessary remember yourself that the most known methods of management arise from the cost accounting which depends on the financial accounting itself. So very wide-spread methods such as the ABC (ACTIVITY-BASED COSTING), the ABM (ACTIVITY-BASED MANAGEMENT), “Cost killer””, etc., rest on the inductor of activity and not on the inductor of costs.
It is only very recently that multi-field searches in management drove to the normalization of the inductor of costs and to its standardization through the new technologies of information and the communication.
See :
- Internal control
- Integration of the internal control
It seems off-topic. Maybe it should go to cost management or corporate governance. mydogategodshat 06:37, 21 Jan 2004 (UTC)
[edit] Revert to good stub, 2 Mar 2004
I have reverted to the most recent good stub, in response to the listing of this page in VfD on March 2 2004 (today). Material removed from this old version appears to be a poor translation from another language and is almost unintelligible, and has been added to several articles from time to time, possibly always by the same anonymous user. Possibly parts of it could be salvaged, but it's not obvious to me whether it is worth trying. If I list it all here, the page will start to get too long and oop don't think it's worth a subpage. Andrewa 13:54, 2 Mar 2004 (UTC)
[edit] Keep the pages separate
I second on the view that management accounting is a more broader discipline than cost accounting. Management accounting incorporates some aspects of cost accounting and its techniques, but also merges areas of finance such as time value of money concepts with pure management accounting activities such as budgeting.
I agree, that as a discipline, cost accounting is one of the branches of management accounting - cost accounting has enough academic and practical substance that it warrants its own course in many college curriculums. From an academic perspective, it is critical that blending is prevented so as to foster more exposure and exploration into various accounting topics. From a perspective of practice, there are no broad brush applications and blending when specific activities in accounting are required.
I vote: Keep the pages separate
Carlton Johnson, Accredited Business Accountant
[edit] Keep that page separate
Cost accounting is a based for Management Accounting. It should be separated. Management Accounting uses the information from the Cost Accouting as Data to produce management information. Cost Accounting the calculation of unit cost for a batch, process, job etc. Management Accounting mosty concern with Decision Making and Control Purpose
