Introduction to managerial accounting
Financial accounting is intended for all users both inside and outside the company. Primarily the users inside the company would be managers who have to make managerial decisions. A lot of the information that managers use to make decisions is not something that a company would want to provide to outsiders such as stockholders, creditors, government agencies and customers. Managerial Accounting is for internal use only.
The main differences between Managerial Accounting and financial accounting are:
Managerial Accounting is more flexible, it doesn’t need to meet requirements of SEC, GAAP, IRS because its only used internal. Furthermore its more timely wich may result in some sacrifice of accuracy. It also emphasises segments of an organisation rather than the company as a whole. Managerial accounting emphasises both quantitative and qualitative considerations. In difference to financial accounting managerial accounting is more forward looking it focuses on how decisions may impact the company rather than on actions wich were made in the past.
The two main parts of managerial Accounting are planning and controlling operations.
Planning is the managerial accounting tool which is used to communicate the ultimate company’s goals to the employees. And gives guidance to the managers to make decisions. Such financial plans are called ‘budgets’. It also identifies the sources and uses of resources. These identified resources of a company are also called assets.
Controlling on the other hand is the managerial tool used for measuring performance, whether the performance of managers or the performance of a whole product, division or segment, and then to compare this performance with the budgets set before and finally take action if necessary.
New Technology has a major impact on the value chain. The value chain includes all the ‘value-adding’ activities of a company from acquiring materials over the operations/production of products or services, selling and marketing these products or services, delivery to customers and service/maintenance to all other related ‘support activities’ including administration, human resources, R&D, etc.
With new technology there came a big shift in the last 10-15 years from labor to machinery. This makes companies more risky cause it is harder to get rid of machinery than to lay of employees thus making it harder to downsize and with that increasing the risk of the company.