Cost Accounting: A Managerial Emphasis, 14th Edition

Book Preface

Studying Cost Accounting is one of the best business investments a student can make. Why? Because success in any organization—from the smallest corner store to the largest multinational corporation—requires the use of cost accounting concepts and practices. Cost accounting provides key data to managers for planning and controlling, as well as costing products, services, even customers. This book focuses on how cost accounting helps managers make better decisions, as cost accountants are increasingly becoming integral members of their company’s decision-making teams. In order to emphasize this prominence in decision-making, we use the “different costs for different purposes” theme throughout this book. By focusing on basic concepts, analyses, uses, and procedures instead of procedures alone, we recognize cost accounting as a managerial tool for business strategy and implementation.

We also prepare students for the rewards and challenges they face in the professional cost accounting world of today and tomorrow. For example, we emphasize both the development of analytical skills such as Excel to leverage available information technology and the values and behaviors that make cost accountants effective in the workplace. Hallmark Features of Cost Accounting

– Exceptionally strong emphasis on managerial uses of cost information
– Clarity and understandability of the text
– Excellent balance in integrating modern topics with traditional coverage
– Emphasis on human behavior aspects
– Extensive use of real-world examples
– Ability to teach chapters in different sequences
– Excellent quantity, quality, and range of assignment material

The first thirteen chapters provide the essence of a one-term (quarter or semester) course. There is ample text and assignment material in the book’s twenty-three chapters for a two-term course. This book can be used immediately after the student has had an introductory course in financial accounting. Alternatively, this book can build on an introductory course in managerial accounting.

Deciding on the sequence of chapters in a textbook is a challenge. Since every instructor has a unique way of organizing his or her course, we utilize a modular, flexible organization that permits a course to be custom tailored. This organization facilitates diverse approaches to teaching and learning.

As an example of the book’s flexibility, consider our treatment of process costing. Process costing is described in Chapters 17 and 18. Instructors interested in filling out a student’s perspective of costing systems can move directly from job-order costing described in Chapter 4 to Chapter 17 without interruption in the flow of material. Other instructors may want their students to delve into activity-based costing and budgeting and more decision-oriented topics early in the course. These instructors may prefer to postpone discussion of process costing.

Brief Contents
1 The Manager and Management Accounting 2
2 An Introduction to Cost Terms and Purposes 26
3 Cost-Volume-Profit Analysis 62
4 Job Costing 98
5 Activity-Based Costing and Activity-Based Management 138
6 Master Budget and Responsibility Accounting 182
7 Flexible Budgets, Direct-Cost Variances, and Management Control 226
8 Flexible Budgets, Overhead Cost Variances, and Management Control 262
9 Inventory Costing and Capacity Analysis 300
10 Determining How Costs Behave 340
11 Decision Making and Relevant Information 390
12 Pricing Decisions and Cost Management 432
13 Strategy, Balanced Scorecard, and Strategic Profitability Analysis 466
14 Cost Allocation, Customer-Profitability Analysis, and Sales-Variance Analysis 502
15 Allocation of Support-Department Costs, Common Costs, and Revenues 542
16 Cost Allocation: Joint Products and Byproducts 576
17 Process Costing 606
18 Spoilage, Rework, and Scrap 644
19 Balanced Scorecard: Quality, Time, and the Theory of Constraints 670
20 Inventory Management, Just-in-Time, and Simplified Costing Methods 702
21 Capital Budgeting and Cost Analysis 738
22 Management Control Systems, Transfer Pricing, and Multinational Considerations 774
23 Performance Measurement, Compensation, and Multinational Considerations 806