Managerial Accounting, 2nd Edition

Book Preface

Today’s business environment is a complex assortment of relationships, all of which are necessary for an organization’s success in the marketplace. These relationships can involve external parties such as suppliers and customers or internal parties such as employees. And all of these relationships rely on some form of managerial accounting information to support decision-making activities.

Non-accounting business majors frequently ask, “Why do I need to take accounting? I’m not going to do accounting; I’ll hire an accountant to do that for me.” What these students fail to understand is that a working knowledge of accounting is essential to success in business, even when the accounting “work” is left to the trained accountants. Decision makers at all levels in the organization must know what accounting information to ask for and must know how to interpret that information before reaching a conclusion about a course of action. For instance, how can a marketing manager decide on a price for a product without fully understanding the product’s cost to manufacture? How can a plant manager determine how to reward employees’ performance without understanding their ability to control costs and quality?

Those of us teaching introductory accounting courses may be partly to blame for this misconception. Often we place too much emphasis on the “accounting” and not enough emphasis on the “business.” We are more concerned with students getting the “right” answer rather than understanding what to do with that right answer. Realizing that most students in an introductory managerial accounting course are not going to major in accounting, this book seeks to position managerial accounting in a broader context of business decision making.

This book does not attempt to be all things for all people. Instead, it is targeted to a typical university sophomore with limited business knowledge, both in terms of theoretical education and practical experience. While the nature of the book may be suitable for other audiences, we anticipate that the majority of students using this book have very little business foundation on which to build. Limited knowledge of business topics is assumed, though we anticipate that students have completed an introductory fi nancial accounting course. Therefore, our overriding objective is to lay a firm foundation of basic managerial accounting on which new concepts in areas of finance, marketing, and management can be built.

The vision of this book is to provide an easy-to-use learning system for introductory managerial accounting students. Our expectation is that this learning system will:

1. facilitate students’ learning of introductory managerial accounting concepts;
2. improve students’ understanding of how to use these concepts as support for management decisions; and,
3. improve students’ retention of these concepts for use in subsequent business and accounting courses.

Brief Contents
Chapter 1. Accounting as a Tool for Management 2
Topic Focus 1: C&C Sports, Managerial
Accounting Context 35
Chapter 2. Cost Behavior and
Cost Estimation 44
Chapter 3. Cost–Volume–Profi t
Analysis and Pricing Decisions 80
Chapter 4. Product Costs and
Job Order Costing 126
Topic Focus 2: Process Costing 179
Topic Focus 3: Variable and Absorption Costing 199
Chapter 5. Planning and Forecasting 216
Chapter 6. Performance Evaluation:
Variance Analysis 286
Topic Focus 4: Standard Costing Systems 339
Chapter 7. Activity-Based Costing and
Activity-Based Management 358
Topic Focus 5: Customer Profi tability 409
Chapter 8. Using Accounting Information
to Make Managerial Decisions 426
Chapter 9. Capital Budgeting 482
Chapter 10. Decentralization and
Performance Evaluation 530
Chapter 11. Performance Evaluation
Revisited: A Balanced Approach 580
Chapter 12. Financial Statement Analysis 620
Chapter 13. Statement of Cash Flows 672