Accounting for Managers

Aims of the course

The basic principles of cost and management accounting will be discussed in combination with examples of practice to achieve the following goals:
- To identify and give examples of variable costs and fixed costs, and explain the difference in their behaviour;
- To define and give examples of direct and indirect costs; to define and give examples of cost classifications used in making decisions;
- To compute the break-even point;
- To distinguish between process costing and job-order costing and identify companies that would use each costing method;
- To explain the major differences between activity-based costing and a traditional costing system and to use the simplified approach to compute activity-based costs and margins;
- To distinguish between relevant and irrelevant costs in decisions;
- To understand why organizations budget and the process they use to create budgets and to understand some criticisms of budgeting;
- To understand the impact of corporate strategy on management accounting.

Course syllabus

1. Cost Terms, Concepts and Classifications, Cost Behaviour (Reading: Garrison et al.; Ch. 2, 5)
2. Cost-volume-profit Analysis (Reading: Garrison et al.; Ch. 7)
3. Traditional Costing (Reading: Garrison et al.; Ch. 3, 4)
4. Activity-based Costing (Reading: Garrison et al.; Ch. 8)
5. Relevant Costs for Decision Making (Reading: Garrison et al.; Ch. 9)
6. Management Control Systems & Management Accounting for Strategic Decision Making (Reading: Garrison et al.; Ch. 17 and additional material provided by lecturers)
7. Budgeting (Reading: Garrison et al.; Ch. 12, 13, 14)

Course director(s)

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  • Office Hours
  • Wednesday at 14:00 in D110
  • Office Hours
  • Tuesday at 13:00 in RZ-204
 
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