Discussion: Reflection and Review

Review and reflect on what you learned in the past 8 weeks. What is the most practical and easily applied lesson you learned? What was the hardest to grasp? Why? What else do you need to know about Managerial Accounting?

Course Description

This course focuses on the identification, gathering, and interpretation of information for planning, controlling, and evaluating the performance of a business. This course studies the measurement of the costs of producing goods or services and how to analyze and control these costs. This course analyzes managerial accounting principles and systems through both process and job order costing. Additional managerial accounting topics include the following: cost behavior, cost-volume-profit analysis, budgeting and standard cost systems, decentralized operations, and product pricing.

Course Objectives

The main objective of this course is to provide a basic understanding of intellectual property law, which is an umbrella term that covers several discrete legal categories: patents, copyrights, trademarks, trade secrets and, by association, unfair competition. At the completion of this course, you will be able to:
1. Compare and contrast between managerial accounting and financial accounting and assess how managerial accounting affects various management functions.
2. Discuss ethical standards in an organization and assess their role in the field of managerial accounting.
3. Define cost and distinguish between product costs and period costs.
4. Analyze the fundamental manufacturing cost categories and diagram the flow of product costs in a manufacturing operation.
5. Describe job-order costing system and evaluate its suitability in manufacturing and nonmanufacturing firms.
6. Describe process costing and evaluate the suitability of process costing in manufacturing and nonmanufacturing firms.
7. Compare and contrast traditional volume-based costing system and activity-based costing system.
8. Interpret cost behavior patterns to estimate costs and assess the need for contribution approach to income statements.
9. Graph CVP relationships and compute the break-even point using the contribution-margin and equation approach.
10. Determine the criteria that decide the relevance of a cost or a benefit and explain the concepts of sunk costs, opportunity costs, and unit costs.
11. Describe the key decision areas in capital budgeting and explain the concept of time value of money.
12. Describe the elements of a budgeting framework and assess the need for a budgeting framework in an organization.
13. Describe the various ways to set performance standards and assess the role of performance standards in cost management
14. Explain the role of responsibility accounting in achieving set goals and list the responsibility centers.
15. Identify the components of a statement of cash flows and show how changes in noncash balance sheet accounts are represented on a statement of cash flows