Managerial Accounting: An Introduction to Concepts, Methods and Uses 10th Edition

Book Preface

Our Statement of Principle

We remain convinced that our primary job as educators is to teach problem-solving skills as well as the organizational (and social) context in which students will, as managers, conduct economic activities. An increasing number of employers ask that business school graduates seek out ways to add value to organizations, not just work competently on projects that superiors assign to them. Focusing on problem-solving skills and the organizational context of decisions will serve current and future students well in responding to employers’ expectations.

Management accounting should not be primarily concerned with making computations. Students should aim to understand the organization’s business issues that created a need for implementing such concepts as activity-based costing and the balanced scorecard. And students should view the success or failure of these methods and concepts in the context of the organization’s operating and business environment. We know many examples in which thoughtful practitioners developed complex activity-based costing, balanced scorecard, and other management accounting methods only to have them fail in implementation. These methods did not fail because of errors in computations; they failed because their developers did not sufficiently understand the problems that the organization needed to solve. Or they failed because these practitioners could not gain agreement on goals and strategies from both top management and the people who would later implement the methods. In other words, understanding business concepts and real incentives for decisions is more valuable than mere proficiency with accounting tools.

As educators, and as authors, we aim to help students develop lifelong problem-solving skills and understand the organizational and social context in which the organization’s members make decisions. Students educated in this manner can add value to organizations and society, whether they work in accounting or some other field.

TheTenth Edition and the Future of Management Accounting

The tenth edition continues to reflect our philosophy in every respect. We emphasize conceptual and analytical thinking over training in procedures. The following three examples demonstrate how we apply that philosophy.

More than three-fourths of the book focuses on managerial decision making (Chapters 1, 4–12). This is not a baby cost accounting book. We want our students to focus on business problem solving and the business context in which they use accounting information.

We devote an entire chapter (Chapter 12) to incentive issues that go beyond the conventional profit and investment center material because students should be aware that these issues drive management decision making to a large degree. This chapter includes extensive discussion of problems with incentive systems that lead to fraudulent financial reporting.

We provide answers to even-numbered exercises in addition to the usual self-study problems so students get immediate feedback on each chapter’s basic ideas. By enabling students to get immediate feedback on each chapter’s basic ideas, we provide opportunity for instructors to explore the big concepts and to integrate ideas from different chapters.