Critics have claimed that traditional managerial accounting is at best useless and at worst dysfunctional and misleading. Most line managers do not trust their management accounting data. 21st Century management accounting develops cost/unit metrics that are useful for budgeting, cost analysis and control. Activity-based costing (ABC) brings truly accurate fact-based costing visibility. ABC does not broadly allocate overhead, but traces costs by identifying cause-and-effect relationships. Such information can provide the ability to reveal true profit margins for products, service-lines, specific sales channels and customers. The same information also helps reduce costs and improve productivity by reporting unit costs that you can use to monitor cost trends and benchmark against your competition. Removing the barriers caused by your current management accounting techniques can provide huge rewards.
Learning Objectives
- Understand current best management accounting techniques
Major Topics
- A taxonomy of accounting: tax, financial, managerial
- A spectrum of direct and indirect absorption costing
- Fact-based Data with Activity Based Costing (ABC )
- Why do we need advanced management accounting techniques, such as ABC?
- How the ABC cost assignment network structure connects costs to products and sales channels
- Learn to use ABC to manage product, service-line, channel, and customer profitability
- Understand two views of costs: (1) process view versus (2) product view
- Comparing ABC with time-driven ABC, resource consumption accounting (RCA), lean accounting, and other costing techniques
- Operational Costing to Optimize Process Costs
- How driver-based budgets and rolling financial forecasts lead to productivity improvement and cost reduction
- Applying “Attributes” to assess ”value-added costs” and “costs of quality (COQ)”
- The Shift in ROI’s Source from Tangible to Intangible Assets
- Increasing the ROI from information – with Corporate Performance Management (Cpm) as a Value-Multiplier
- Accelerating the Rate of Adoption for Implementing and Cpm
- Understand the barriers that slow the adoption rate of Cpm: technical, misperceptions, model design, and social / cultural
- How to overcome behavioral resistance to change
