Talk:Management accounting

Proposed merge with Cost Accounting
''A merge seems to have been proposed, so here's a place to discuss it. Please sign your votes/comments with ~ '' However, as the century developed, accountants were called upon to supply managers with accounting and cost information for some additional purposes. These included for planning and control, and information for decision-making. Such functions meant that cost accounting had increased its boundaries and was no longer confined to dealing with historical data. Planning and decision-making, for example, primarily looks towards the future while cost accounting is based very much on the past. The term 'cost accounting' was, therefore, no longer appropriate to describe a much wider range of functions and the much broader description of 'management accounting' has taken its place. Hence cost accounting is now regarded as being merely a branch of management accounting
 * Keep the pages separate - the two disciplines are distinct. Cost accounting, as the name implies, is an occupation involved with the estimation of the cost of making a particular item.  Management accounting, whilst sometimes drawing upon some of the techniques of cost accounting, is more broad and focuses on management decision making. 203.129.42.204
 * Conditional Support - the management accounting article isn't as neat and tidy as the cost accounting article... however, if we merged them, we should merge them into management accounting. My rationale is drawn from this quote from "Accounting for non-accounting students" by J.R.Dyson:
 * Mike1024 (talk/contribs) 13:46, 30 September 2005 (UTC)

SN14534, Oct 26 2005
 * Keep the pages separate - The cost accounting article is good and should stand alone.  The management accounting article, I'd agree, isn't especially neat and tidy - and should be expanded to cover more of the other aspects of management accounting (performance reporting, budgeting, etc.).  I'll try to add some material.

Keep the pages separate. Managerial accounting or management accounting is broader than cost accounting although some older texts like Horngren, Dater & Foster cling to the old term of cost accounting. Managerial accounting should be at the top of the hierarch and cost accounting (pure) one of its three branches. The material below that has been removed really is off topic and belongs under internal control to which the links correctly point one. MVB Dec 14 2005


 * Management accounting and Cost accounting are two separate and distinct accounting specialization. While there are some overlapping functions in both practices, management accounting has a broader sense because it involves forecasting and feasiblity studies, the use of statistical measurements to compute for future values and the confidentiality of the reports, which are only available for top management. Cost accounting, on the other hand, focuses more on the manufacturing industry and the proper valuation and reporting of its production. Modelwatcher 09:16, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

I have removed:

RECENT EVENTS

Since 2002, the global step of reduction of costs and optimization of resources became a legal constraint, an obligation for all the highly-rated corporations or unquoted in the stock exchange.

Everything began with the law SARBANNES-OXLEY in the United States in 2002 who returned compulsory internal control. From 2003, Canada and European Economic Community took measures aiming at identical objectives:

1-	The realization and optimization of the operations of reduction of costs and management of the performance;

2-	The reliability of the financial information of costs and performances;

3-	Correspondence to laws and to current regulations, notably standards of management of the quality;

4-	The implementation of the rules of good governance “to play collective” : -Every individual member of the company contributes to his level of responsibility in the internal control;

-The responsibilities of the staff of frame vary according to hierarchical levels;

- The general manager assures ultimate responsibility; he is responsible for the system of internal control;

-The directors of the various units are responsible for the internal control bound to the objectives of this one;

-The financial executives and their teams play a role of dominating piloting: they follow and analyze performances, by report not only in objectives bound to financial information, but also to those bound to the operations of the company and to the legal obligations.

These measures which impose the internal coherence as base of the management put company in front of a major technological challenge: the integration of their system of internal control.

Internal control directed towards “realization and optimization of the operations of reduction of costs and management of the performance" gets organized indeed around the notion of inductors of costs, the unforeseen phenomenon, the abnormality or the dysfunction which provokes an increase of costs. By opposition the inductor of activity is the event which activates the activity of the company.

To understand difficulty recovering, it is necessary remember yourself that the most known methods of management arise from the cost accounting which depends on the financial accounting itself. So very  wide-spread methods such as the ABC (ACTIVITY-BASED COSTING), the ABM (ACTIVITY-BASED MANAGEMENT), “Cost killer””, etc., rest on the inductor of activity and not on the inductor of costs.

It is only very recently that multi-field searches in management drove to the normalization of the inductor of costs and to its standardization through the new technologies of information and the communication. It´s a very very hard work to dessempeñatte for a person that only control you. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.58.205.56 (talk) 08:51, 25 March 2011 (UTC)

See :


 * Internal control
 * Integration of the internal control

It seems off-topic. Maybe it should go to cost management or corporate governance. mydogategodshat 06:37, 21 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Revert to good stub, 2 Mar 2004
I have reverted to the most recent good stub, in response to the listing of this page in VfD on March 2 2004 (today). Material removed from this old version appears to be a poor translation from another language and is almost unintelligible, and has been added to several articles from time to time, possibly always by the same anonymous user. Possibly parts of it could be salvaged, but it's not obvious to me whether it is worth trying. If I list it all here, the page will start to get too long and oop don't think it's worth a subpage. Andrewa 13:54, 2 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Keep the pages separate
I second on the view that management accounting is a more broader discipline than cost accounting. Management accounting incorporates some aspects of cost accounting and its techniques, but also merges areas of finance such as time value of money concepts with pure management accounting activities such as budgeting.

I agree, that as a discipline, cost accounting is one of the branches of management accounting - cost accounting has enough academic and practical substance that it warrants its own course in many college curriculums. From an academic perspective, it is critical that blending is prevented so as to foster more exposure and exploration into various accounting topics. From a perspective of practice, there are no broad brush applicatio

Cost accounting is a based for Management Accounting. It should be separated. Management Accounting uses the information from the Cost Accouting as Data to produce management information. Cost Accounting the calculation of unit cost for a batch, process, job etc. Management Accounting mosty concern with Decision Making and Control Purpose

Why does Account Manager redirect here??
Why does Account manager redirect here?? Its nothing to do with Accounting. --Jezarnold (talk) 10:16, 27 April 2008 (UTC)

- I'll second that. Someone doesn't know what an 'Account Manager' is. Indeed, I'm applying to be one, and 'Accounting' is at the other end of the 'Jobs I'd like' scale... 86.0.58.221 (talk) 13:51, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

- Same, anyone that knows anything about accounting versus sales or business development will find this extremely odd. Also anyone that watches Mad Men! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.136.100.235 (talk) 08:28, 7 November 2008 (UTC)

Keep the Pages Separate
Yes to keeping these pages separate. As discussed by other parties above, Cost accounting is a subset of Managerial Accounting. According to the International Federation of Accountants (IFAC) and their July 2009 International Good Practice Guide - Evaluating and Improving Costing in Organizations, Figure 1(pg7) highlights that Managerial Accounting indeed covers three primary areas of cost measurement:
 * Cost accounting
 * Cost Performance Evaluation & Analysis
 * Planning & Decision Support

Can the Proposed Merge tag now be deleted? Comments by Bewiki777 (talk) 22:38, 31 October 2011 (UTC)

Unable to change German link
The current German link (Kosten- und Leistensrechnung) is not the best fit for this article and in my opinion it should be linked to the 'Controlling' article. I've tried to change it, but it won't allow the change. Its explanation for why it won't allow the change is completely incomprehensible. If anyone understands this new linking system, could they make this change. (On a side note, as a translator, I used to add lots of links to German articles using the old, super user-friendly system, but the new linking system is utterly incomprehensible and I've had to give up on trying to add links). 5.10.152.24 (talk) 10:43, 6 September 2013 (UTC)

A little too heavy on the GPK/RCA thing?
These two closely-related items are mentioned at various places, and it just feels a wee bit unbalanced. I don’t see an issue with there being a passing mention and pointer to the main article, but as it stands the amount of text devoted to these areas could mislead the reader as to their overall significance. Also, the tone is a little too fan-like for my taste.

I’ve marked the relevant parts, and invite discussion here. I note that the initial author of the main GPK article had a wiki username that suggests they were associated with the RCA Institute, so it would be useful if anyone participating in this discussion disclosed any relevant affiliations. (For my own part I have no such affiliations)70.112.38.105 (talk) 23:15, 14 August 2018 (UTC)

Explain any three developments in management Accounting
Need answers to the questions Kabacwamba babra (talk) 17:31, 3 September 2018 (UTC)

Answers Kabacwamba babra (talk) 17:32, 3 September 2018 (UTC)