The Top 7 Trends in Management Accounting

Learning Objectives

• To discuss how these trends have expanded accountants from “bean counters” to “bean growers.”
• To analyze how to calculate profit and loss statements for customers displaying profit margin layers.
• To inspect how to identify and differentiate strategic KPIs in a balanced scorecard and operational performance indicators (PIs) in dashboards.
• To investigate how to perform “predictive accounting” for capacity-sensitive driver-based budgets / rolling financial forecasts, what-if analysis, and outsourcing decisions.
• To discuss how to imbed statistics and analytics into a product, channel, and customer profitability analysis.
• To analyze how to overcome implementation barriers such as behavioral resistance to change and fear of being held accountable.

Course Description

In management accounting or managerial accounting, managers use the provisions of accounting information to better inform themselves before they decide matters within their organizations, which aids their management and performance of control functions.

Management accounting is more than a vital process of preparing management reports and accounts with accurate and timely financial and statistical data. It is also a profession that involves management decision-making, devising planning systems, and assisting management in the creation and implementation of an organization’s strategy.

Ultimately costing principles, such as the causality principle, must be converted into practical practices with supporting tools.

This Online CPE Webinar on Accounting examines how cost modeling has evolved over the last century. It will describe the trends and obstacles that have helped or delayed developments. 

These evolving areas and trends include:

• The expansion from product costing to include channel and customer profitability reporting and analysis.
• The integration of managerial accounting with other enterprise and corporate performance management (EPM/CPM) methods (e.g., the balanced scorecard, incentive compensation, risk management, supply chain management).
• The shift from historical reporting to predictive accounting (e.g., marginal/incremental costing; capacity-sensitive driver-based rolling financial forecasts, performance-based and driver-based budgeting, customer lifetime value [CLV]).
• Imbedding analytics into managerial accounting (e.g., correlation and segmentation analysis, recursive partitioning with decision trees).
• Acceptance of two or more co-existing managerial accounting methods.
• Chargebacks to internal users and service level agreements of information technology (IT) and shared services.
• Recognition of barriers slowing the adoption rate of advanced managerial accounting (e.g., resistance to change, being held accountable, weak leadership) to gain buy-in.

Overview

• Who will benefit from this presentation?

  3 mins
• The general ledger view is Structurally deficient for decision analysis

  10 mins
• Optimizing customer value

  19 mins
• Scorecard lessons being painfully learned

  26 mins
• Linking strategy and risk to the budget

  38 mins