Cheryl McWatters
Jerold L Zimmerman, University of Rochester
Dale Morse

Publisher: Financial Times Press
Copyright: 2008
Format: Paper; 624 pp

ISBN-10:	0273712470
ISBN-13:	9780273712473

Our Price: £42.99
Status: Not Yet Published
Estimated Availability: 21 Jul 2008

This book provides students and managers with an understanding of and appreciation of the strengths and limitations of an organisation’s accounting system. A key goal of the book is to allow them to be intelligent and critical users of the system. An analytical framework for organisational change is used throughout the book to underscore how organisations must adapt to create customer and organisational value. The text highlights the role of management accounting as an integral part of the organisation’s strategy and not a set of individual concepts and computations.

Organisational success is linked to the existence of an appropriate management accounting system. The book is framed within the context of a global economy, one increasingly affected by technological change, customer needs, regulatory requirements and competition. In such an environment, organisations must continue to evolve to keep pace with these major forces. Whether the accounting system is used for making planning decisions or used to measure and/or influence behaviours as part of the organisational control system, its purpose overall is to help the organisation create value through improved decision making and control.

1. Organisations and Accounting

2. Measuring and analysing activity costs (Planning)

3. Measuring and analysing product costs (Planning) 

4. Managing activities (Strategy and Planning)

5. Short term decisions and constraints (Planning)

6. Managing organisations (Strategy and Control)

7. Decentralised organisations (Control)

8. Budgeting (Planning and Control)

9. Cost allocations (Planning and Control)

10. Absorption costing systems (Planning and Control)

11. Variable costing and capacity costs (Planning and Control)

12. Standard Costs and Variance Analysis (Control)

13. Investment decisions (Planning)

14.

End Matter - thoughts on business analysis, answers to concept reviews, index

• Framework for Organisational Change presented in Chapter One, and applied consistently throughout the text.
• Trade-offs in that one accounting system cannot meet all information demands; some aspects of the system are better used as a control mechanism; others as a planning device. No one system can do all and organisations cannot afford the luxury of one system for each purpose.
• Business Analyses to demonstrate through real world examples how organisations deal with the challenge to create organisational value. These examples incorporate questions linked to the analytical framework to encourage students to think about how an organisation might approach such issues.
• Numerical and conceptual examples throughout the text to re-inforce chapter material.
• End-of-chapter material, linked to the learning objectives, which emphasises analysis and interpretation, along with numerical computations. Problems frequently do not have one right answer, requiring students to develop critical thinking skills. Problems and cases are multi-dimensional to motivate students to examine situations from a broad management perspective and often competing angles.
• Chapters that build on each other; the first presents the analytical framework and trade-offs in uses of the accounting system; the next four chapters focus on strategy and planning decisions; chapter six and seven examine strategy and control mechanisms; the following four chapters develop an understanding of the trade-offs that occur when accounting systems are used for both planning and control; chapter twelve provides a summary of the text and points to current innovations in management accounting; the next two chapters can be integrated into the chapter sequence, depending on the specifics of the course