Managerial Accounting

Financial and Management Accounting: Basic Features

Some key differences between financial and management accounting are as follows:

Audience
Financial – External (and Internal): Stockholders, creditors, tax authorities….
Management – Internal: managers

Purpose
Financial – valuation and stewardship assessment.
Management – to make decisions, communicate strategy, evaluate performance, control/align behavior.

Timeliness
Financial –historical or ex post; at regular intervals; relatively long reporting periods
Management – Current, and future oriented, but also historical for control; reporting periods depend on
need

Regulation
Financial – regulated; rules driven by generally accepted accounting principles and government authorities
Management – no regulations; systems and information determined by management to meet strategic
and operational needs; not required by law

Type of Information
Financial – financial measurements only
Management – financial plus operational and physical measurements on processes, technologies, suppliers,
customers, and competitors

Qualitative Characteristics of Information

Financial – auditable, reliable
Management – not subject to audit, could be more subjective
 Scope
Financial – highly aggregated; report on entire organization
Management – not aggregated; informs local decisions and actions

Behavioral distortions
Financial – primarily reports economic events but also influences behavior because, e.g., manager’s
compensation is often based on reported financial results
Management –could distort the behavior of managers and other employees, because of link to
performance evaluation and reward system

Managerial accounting is broad.

It straddles competitive strategy, organizational economics, finance, operations management and
organizational behavior.

It also provides useful knowledge for all organizational settings:

for-profits,
non-profits,
government agencies,
etc.
Here are some topics we will cover.
As they will illustrate, the demand for managerial accounting info stems from its use in:

Decision Making and Planning

Cost Management

Strategic Cost Management

Management Control
 Decision Making and Planning

Managers make decisions, and therefore need information. Some common decisions we will study are:
suppose your company makes medical probes.
In July, you receive a call from a company that is not a regular customer.
They would like to purchase 5000 probes this month only, and the price they offer is below
your production cost.
Should you accept this one-time special order, and under what circumstances?
What information do you need to make this decision?
suppose each probe costs $10 to produce, and 70% of this cost is due
to one part, a fibre optic wire, that you also manufacture.
Should you continue to make this costly part, or should you buy it from an outside vendor, and
under what circumstances?
What information do you need?

suppose you manufacture five other types of medical devices.

Should you add another product line, or drop a line, and under what circumstances?
What information do you need?
suppose you are planning for the upcoming year, and you need to determine how many units to sell to
breakeven, or to make a target profit figure.
What information do you need?

In public policy debates, an example of a decision might be:

palliative care or not for cancer patients – what is the cost;
what is the objective, to minimize cost or something else?
 Cost Management

We used cost estimates to make the decisions illustrated above.

But how are these costs determined or measured.
Understanding cost measurement helps us manage costs.
Managing cost is especially important today because of:
global competition, that requires better knowledge of costs.
Some companies choose a low-cost leadership strategy.
Measuring and managing costs is the lynchpin of this strategy;

global competition also requires focus on quality.

Improved quality can result from process improvements made during the course of
identifying cost drivers, since streamlined process generally improves quality;
It can also come from reduction of waste, which comes from better measurement
of waste;

some companies choose a product differentiation strategy, which requires analysis of costs from
customers viewpoint.
What features are worthwhile to customers?
This requires looking at cost from customers’ viewpoint, and eliminating costs that
are not valued;
 Managing cost is especially important today because of:
shorter – 2 to 3 years – product life cycles, which require more accurate up-front projections
about profitability of proposed investment, and leave less room for error in production
planning and product costing;
increasing automation, which means that labor is no longer the only major overhead
cost driver.
This requires more care in identifying, measuring and managing cost drivers.

In product costing, we will shed light on some of the following issues:

What is the true cost of a product?
This is not as straightforward as it seems.
For example, Roberts vs. GSA and cost of federal courts – why the half billion-dollar
discrepancy?
Reported cost is malleable, and can be exploited.
E.g., Stanford yacht.
Cost-plus contracts vulnerable, therefore carefully specify which costs qualify.
How can we refine cost estimates?
What is the cost of excess capacity?
How much is optimal?
Who should bear this cost?
 Strategic Cost Management

This requires finding and eliminating non-value-added activities, structures, etc. in the business ecosystem, rather
than just within the business itself.
It requires understanding of ecosystem, the value chain and supply chain.
The supply chain is the sequence activities that transform the raw materials into finished goods
delivered to the consumer.
The value chain is the portion of the supply chain within the company.
 Management Accountant’s Role in Implementing Strategy

Different Parts of the Value Chain

Design of
Research
Products, Customer
and Production Marketing Distribution
Services, Service
Development
or Processes

Management Accounting
Strategic cost management requires going beyond providing information demanded by specific decisions, to
proactively identifying, measuring and managing key cost drivers within the entire supply chain.

Examples of strategic cost management initiatives include measuring customer profitability, and
working with suppliers to implement JIT.
Incorporate cost into product design : controlling parts proliferation; target costing
 Management Control

This refers to performance evaluation, incentive alignment and minimizing divergence of actual results from
desired results.
In the discussion above, we assumed neutrality of information (i.e., freedom from
bias).
Now we introduce bias, by recognizing the presence of agency issues.
 These arise because the interests of the business owners are not perfectly aligned with the self-
interest of the owners’ agents – firm managers and employees.
Decentralized organizations require the assignment of decision rights to points (people)
further away from the owner.

To control, or minimize, agency issues requires measuring or evaluating performance and rewarding agents
appropriately.
How do we measure both organizational and individual performance – which metrics should we use and
what are their implications?
Measure should be ‘hard’ or verifiable. E.g., RAF bomber command.
Performance metrics determine rewards, and therefore behavior, which in turn influences
profits.
Inappropriate metrics can have costly consequences. E.g., CMS uses timing of pneumonia-
related antibiotic therapy as performance measure.

One of the concepts we will highlight is that using a piece of information for control impairs its use for decision
making.
For example, getting projected sales from salespeople when preparing the budget.
This problem is especially salient in large, decentralized organizations, in organizations
where specialized knowledge is required for decision making and where decision timeliness
is critical.

We will study some of the following management control tools and concepts:
(a) budgets (aid in control not just planning);
(b) transfer prices, or internal prices which aid in control of resource usage;
(c) the controllability principle and relative performance evaluation (RPE may be older than suspected
– Hammurabi’s code)
(d) responsibility accounting and responsibility centers;
(e) variance analysis;
(f) multiple performance measures and non-financial performance measures.
 External Environment and Management Accounting

Shocks in the external environment feed through and affect

management accounting, e.g.,
manufacturers using just-in-time inventories

Summary

The role of managerial accountants is

identification,
measurement, and
management
of key operational and financial value drivers (Institute of
Management Accountants, 1999).
Managerial accountants are
problem solvers (e.g., providing information for
decision making),
scorekeepers (e.g., measuring performance of
individuals, groups and processes), and
attention directors (e.g., strategic cost management).