Unlike financial accounting, which produces annual reports mainly for external stakeholders, management accounting generates monthly or weekly reports for an organization's internal audiences such as department managers and the chief executive officer. These reports typically show the amount of available cash, sales revenue generated, amount of orders in hand, state of accounts payable and accounts receivable, outstanding debts, raw material and inventory, and may also include trend charts, variance analysis, and other statistics. Also called managerial accounting.
cost accounting: A method of accounting in which all costs incurred in carrying out an activity or accomplishing a purpose are collected, classified, and recorded. This data is then summarized and analyzed to arrive at a selling price, or to determine where savings are possible.
In contrast to financial accounting (which considers money as the measure of economic performance) cost accounting considers money as the economic factor of production.
opportunity cost: A benefit, profit, or value of something that must be given up to acquire or achieve something else. Since every resource (land, money, time, etc.) can be put to alternative uses, every action, choice, or decision has an associated opportunity cost.
Opportunity costs are fundamental costs in economics, and are used in computing cost benefit analysis of a project. Such costs, however, are not recorded in the account books but are recognized in decision making by computing the cash outlays and their resulting profit or loss.
corporate governance: The framework of rules and practices by which a board of directors ensures accountability, fairness, and transparency in a company's relationship with its all stakeholders