Costs for Decision Making & Activity-Based Costing in business management analyzes expenses to aid strategic decisions, allocating costs based on activities, enhancing cost accuracy, and profitability.
If you read the 'business pages' of a newspaper or if you listen to the financial news on the television or radio, you will often hear terms such as 'liability', 'balance sheet' or 'earnings'. These terms turn up in non-financial contexts as well: 'he was more of a liability than an asset'. If you invest in shares, have a building society account, or sit on a committee of the property company which owns your apartment block, you will receive financial statements every year. If you are a manager in a company, a hospital or a school, you will see accounting information often. This Very Short Introduction provides a guide to understanding and using accounting information. Christopher Nobes explains the main areas of accounting work, from bookkeeping and financial reporting to auditing and management accounting. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
Praise for Project Management Accounting: Budgeting, Tracking, and Reporting Costs and Profitability "You don't need to be a Six Sigma Black Belt or a CPA to understand the principles and the practical tools presented by Callahan, Stetz, and Brooks in Project Management Accounting. Their approach focuses on sound financial practices that will improve the ROI of your project whether it is your first or your hundred-and-first experience." —Barry Van Dyck, PhD Director of Degree Programs, Executive Education, Mendoza College of Business, University of Notre Dame "Project Management Accounting serves as a solid resource for the project manager seeking to leverage the tools of accounting and finance to maximize the quality of project outcomes." —Jeffrey J. Lampe, CFA Vice President, Hopewell Ventures "Project Management Accounting clearly communicates fundamental accounting principles and applies them skillfully to the field of project management . . . even seasoned accounting managers will likely benefit from the application to project management. Talented project managers will find enough finance and accounting tools to transition toward profit and loss responsibility. This book will serve as a handy reference." —Warren Davidson CEO, Global Source Mfg. "This is a must-read for everyone in business, whether you have made a career in project management, operations, facilities, or anywhere else. Project Management Accounting provides the framework to understand not only how to manage any project, but how the project interacts with the different functions of the company for the overall good. When applied, [this book] will improve the profitability of the company through an understanding of the costs and benefits of each project." —Michael Alte Management Director, ArvinMeritor Today's project managers need to understand finance and accounting concepts in order to make both informed decisions and a greater contribution to their organization. Written for readers with limited business backgrounds, Project Management Accounting is an invaluable guide to successfully performing projects using sound finance and accounting concepts. With the collected insights of authors and respected industry experts Kevin Callahan, Gary Stetz, and Lynne Brooks, Project Management Accounting offers guidance that project managers can use right away to know how to budget appropriately. Brief in presentation and rich in content, Project Management Accounting equips the leaders of today and tomorrow to hit the ground running with a profound business perspective in their current work and in future projects.
Analyzing and managing costs is crucial for business success. Industrial, service, and non-profit companies will not be successful in the long-term if they do not understand their costs.This textbook introduces the basic concepts and current developments in cost accounting. The book features numerous anecdotal examples from a wide range of industries, case studies, Microsoft Excel examples, and exercises to ensure a sustainable learning success.
In the classroom, ABC looks like a great way to manage a company’s resources. But many executives who have tried to implement ABC on a large scale in their organizations have found the approach limiting and frustrating. Why? The employee surveys that companies used to estimate resources required for business activities proved too time-consuming, expensive, and irritating to employees. This book shows you how to implement time-driven activity-based costing (TDABC), an easier and more powerful way to implement ABC. You can now estimate directly the resource demands imposed by each business transaction, product, or customer. The payoff? You spend less time and money obtaining and maintaining TDABC data—and more time addressing problems that TDABC reveals, such as inefficient processes, unprofitable products and customers, and excess capacity. The authors also show how to use TDABC to link strategic planning to operational budgeting, to enhance the due diligence process for mergers and acquisitions, and to support continuous improvement activities such as lean management and benchmarking. In presenting their model, the authors define the two questions required to build TDABC: 1) How much does it cost per time unit to supply resource capacity for each business process? 2) How much resource capacity (time) is required to perform work for a company’s many transactions, products, and customers? The book demonstrates how to develop simple, valid answers to these two questions. Kaplan and Anderson illustrate the TDABC approach with a wealth of case studies, in diverse settings, based on actual implementations.
Managerial Accounting provides students with a clear introduction to fundamental managerial accounting concepts. One of the major goals of this product is to orient students to the application of accounting principles and techniques in practice. By providing students with numerous opportunities for practice with a focus on real-world companies, students are better prepared as decision makers in the contemporary business world.
This book illustrates the importance effective cost management systems in providing a supportive environment in which reliable and relevant management information can be generated. Such a cost management system is only attainable if the importance of key business, operational and stakeholder requirements are recognised within the organisational context. In illustrating this importance, this book provides several case studies as examples thereof. The first two case studies focus on the engineering sector and illustrates the development of a cost management system in a water recycling context; and the design of a budgetary system in a mining engineering context. The remaining case studies focus on the services sector, including cost management systems for a digital technology services provider and a medical insurance services provider; an alternative activity-based costing approach for a public sector services provider; and finally a re-designed value stream for an automotive services provider. Academic researchers and industry managers in the fields of management accounting and financial management, as well as engineering and operations management, will find value in the experiences described herein.
This book is an adaptation of the successful US text Cost Management by Hilton, Maher and Selto, written specifically for an international audience.Major improvements include:Diverse and truly international examples of organizations - Examples used throughout the book are from all over the world and represent manufacturing, retail, not-for-profit, and service firms in many different countries. Completely restructured and rewritten text - The book has been rewritten, restructured and also shortened significantly to align content closer with international courses. Integral use of spreadsheets - Spreadsheet software is used for explaining techniques and making applications more realistic. In depth research - Summaries of international research studies that address important cost management issues have been updated and more references to recent research findings have been added. Intuitive explanation of accounting - The authors show directly how events impact the balance sheet and profit and loss account.