Management And Cost Accounting

The aim of the eighth edition of this book is to explain the principles involved in designing and evaluating management and cost accounting information systems. Management accounting systems accumulate, classify, summarize and report information that will assist employees within an organization in their decision-making, planning, control and performance measurement activities. A cost accounting system is concerned with accumulating costs for inventory valuation to meet external financial accounting and internal monthly or quarterly profit measurement requirements. As the title suggests, this book is concerned with both management and cost accounting but emphasis is placed on the former.

A large number of cost and management accounting textbooks have been published. Many of these books contain a detailed description of accounting techniques without any discussion of the principles involved in evaluating management and cost accounting systems. Such books often lack a conceptual framework, and ignore the considerable amount of research conducted in management accounting in the past three decades. At the other extreme, some books focus entirely on a conceptual framework of management accounting with an emphasis on developing normative models of what ought to be. These books pay little attention to accounting techniques. My objective has been to produce a book which falls within these two extremes.

This book is intended primarily for undergraduate students who are pursuing a one-year or two-year management accounting course, and for students who are preparing for the cost and management accounting examinations of the professional accountancy bodies at an intermediate or advanced professional level. It should also be of use to postgraduate and higher national diploma students who are studying cost and management accounting for the first time. An introductory course in financial accounting is not a prerequisite, although many students will have undertaken such a course.