The role of managerial accounting has been continually growing, now its purpose being: the analytic analysis of the internal management of the enterprise; stock cost calculation, as a basis for the negotiation of the sales price with the potential clients; the determination of the products' works or services' return; drawing the budgets on price with different types of activities, expenses, sub units; cost-control; providing useful information in the decision process.
Performance is a key concept in the theoretical and practical economic approaches, including diverse notions, of which the most important are: activity development, profitability, return, productivity, completeness.
The concept of performance cannot be reduced only to the "exploitation result" or to the "increase of the net accounting value" (Nadia & Catalin, 2008). Profit is a consequence of a whole sequence of events that lead to it. If one discusses performance, one has to consider all the links of this chain of events. An efficient enterprise is one that continues to produce for a long time what clients want to buy.
Performance is not measured, it needs to be actively created, so that the managerial accountant needs to use his talent to contribute to the creation "ex ante" of the context that will allow the maximization of the probability to obtain a satisfactory "ex post" result. In this sense, the following statement: "accounting is the impartial judge of the past, the necessary guide of the present and the indispensable counselor of the future in each enterprise" (Hindle, 1998) perfectly matches what we have just said.
In the present context, managerial accounting constitutes a very actual and interesting accounting both for specialists and especially for the small and medium enterprises managers. They have to assimilate elementary managerial accounting knowledge, consisting in the specific terminology and the essential techniques of this domain concerning the efficient use and management of the information available in order to make decisions, but especially
in order to understand the limitation of this information.
Managerial accounting has evolved from a historical perspective, as the merchandise production and the market economy developed. In the past, when the market belonged exclusively to the producer, due to the lack of goods, it was possible to limit the role of managerial accounting to the calculation of the complete costs, allowing the producer to adapt his prices to the cost movement process. Gradually, due to the intensified competition, new management models have shown up, which influence the evolution of the managerial accounting systems, helping preview the cost level and structure and its operative control.
In Romania, the managerial accounting activity is regulated by the norms concerning the application of the accountability law no. 82/1991, where in art.105 it is mentioned: "Managerial accounting is mainly meant to record the operations concerning the collection and the re-partition of the expenses on destinations, respectively on activities, sections, fabrication stages, production settlement and the calculation of the production cost of the products made, of the works carried out and of the services provided, including the ongoing production.