Managerial Accounting, 8th Edition

Book Preface

This revision of Managerial Accounting is the most significant in the book’s long history. The substantial changes we have made meet the needs of today’s students, who not only face a business world increasingly complicated by ethical issues, globalization, and technology, but who also have more demands on their time. To help them meet these challenges, we place a heavy emphasis on developing their decision-making and critical-thinking skills and on providing information that is easy to understand and process.

Our primary focus is on showing students how successful managers use the tools and techniques of managerial accounting to make decisions about both day-to-day operations and long-term tactics and strategy. Our hope is not to make expert accountants of students, but to enable them to become knowledgeable, informed managers who use their organization’s resources ethically and wisely and who, in doing so, protect and promote stakeholders’ interests.

We invite you to read the User’s Guide that follows this preface to get a sense of how this book and its many learning aids were designed to support a variety of learning styles and help students become effective managers skilled in using accounting information. Here, we elaborate on exactly what we set out to achieve in this eighth edition.

Streamlined Coverage and Redesign of Text

To make the text more readable, visually appealing, and pedagogically useful, we broke it into “user-friendly” portions with bulleted and numbered lists and added new Focus on Business boxes, line art, photographs, and end-of-section review material.

• New line art clarifies concepts and appeals to students who are visual learners.
• Photographs, with captions that underscore concepts in the text, increase visual interest.
  
• For learners who favor a hands-on approach, a new feature called “Stop• Review•Apply” presents review questions related to specific learning objectives. Many of these sections also include short exercises and their solutions. The Online Study Center (student website) provides the answers to the review questions, as well as many other resources for all types of learners.

We also reduced excessive detail, shortened headings, and simplified explanations. Last but not least, we made the text more accessible to students by using well-known companies to illustrate the concepts and techniques of managerial accounting.

Brief Contents
1 The Changing Business Environment:A Manager’s Perspective 2
2 Cost Concepts and Cost Allocation 52
3 Costing Systems: Job Order Costing 110
4 Costing Systems:Process Costing 154
5 Activity-Based Systems:ABM and JIT 196
6 Cost Behavior Analysis 244
7 The Budgeting Process 290
8 Performance Management and Evaluation 346
9 Standard Costing and Variance Analysis 392
10 Short-Run Decision Analysis 442
11 Pricing Decisions, Including Target Costing and Transfer Pricing 486
12 Capital Investment Analysis 534
13 Quality Management and Measurement 574
14 Allocation of Internal Service Costs and Joint Product Costs 616
15 Financial Performance Measurement 656
APPENDIX A Future Value and Present Value Tables 706