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Managerial Accounting Career Paper
What is managerial accounting?
Managerial accounting provides managers with information to help control operations inside the company. Managerial accounting is sometimes called cost accounting, which is basically an expanded phase of general or financial accounting which provides management with the production cost, selling cost, or the cost of services that the company may provide. Managerial accountants prepare a variety of reports that help the managers focus on how well they are doing as well as how well the company is doing by comparing their production and other things to the plans that were set in advance. Some reports also provide updates on important indications of how many orders were received, how many orders have been back logged, how much the company has utilized the buildings capacity and last but not least their sales. Other reports are prepared during investigations into problems that have occurred, for example, a decline in profitability in a line of products.
The difference between financial accounting and managerial accounting is that with financial accounting, it is geared mostly towards producing a limited set of annual and quarterly financial statements that follow the guidelines of the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP for short); these reports are sent to the stock holders of the company. While with Managerial accounting the reports are given to the people whom are actually managing the company every day and have knowledge of how a business environment works. Management accounting information comes with reports of financial ratios, budget forecasts, variance analysis and cost accounting. Without management accounting information, making these decisions would be more like gambling and less of a science. Which in effect could cause a company to go belly up, so to speak. Some of the different jobs someone with a managerial