Management Accounting

The aim of the course is to provide the students with a comprehensive understanding of accounting's role in the internal management of an organization, be it private, public or not-for-profit. Specifically, this course focuses on the decision facilitating and decision influencing roles - the two major roles of (management) accounting. 

The decision facilitating role: Effective management must identify the available alternative actions, predict the possible consequences of those actions, and then choose that action which has the most preferred outcome. Management accounting systems are helpful for identifying potential actions and are useful tools for predicting the possible consequences of alternative actions as well for the recording of economic consequences of the chosen action. 

This course studies the cost accumulation processes, estimation of cost curves, and cost allocation principles which are employed to deliver the decision facilitating information. Specifically, advanced models of structuring decision problems are developed and situations where no well-defined cost functions exist are analyzed.

The decision influencing role: Managers may not make the choices most preferred by a firm's owners (or higher-level managers). To mitigate this problem, the firm's owners (or higher-level managers) frequently establish formal or informal incentive systems that are designed to motivate the manager to choose the actions preffered by owners (or higher-level managers). Management accounting systems are an important part of the incentive systems as these provide performance measures. 

This course first lays down the economic foundation of incentive problems. Thereafter, the role of accounting systems in resolving incentive problems is emphasized. 

Finally, topics that cross boundaries between the two major roles of accounting (like budget mechanisms and procedures, benchmarking, divisional reporting, and transfer pricing) are explored. 

Following the course, the students should be well prepared for career in management controlling, auditing, or for positions where a solid knowledge of the economics of management is in demand. 

Content - Key areas: 

• The economic foundations of management accounting
• Modeling cost behavior 
• Traditional Product Costing  
• Activity Based Costing  
• The role of cost in the representation of decision problems  
• Fundamentals of Decision Making under Uncertainty
• Information Asymmetry in Strategic Settings 
• Principal agent modeling  
• Performance Evaluation  
• Coordination problems 

The student can independently account for following contemporary accounting topics:

• Cost accounting procedures  
• Structuring a decision problem, when the no well-defined cost curve exists
• Decision making under uncertainty
• The role of private information in strategic setting 
• Principal-agent models and performance evaluation 
• Models of coordination

The students can:

• Set up a decision problem in consistent manner. 
• Analyze and reflect upon cost accounting procedure and  
• Account for a choice between different cost accounting procedures 
• Analyze and reflect upon consequences of private information in strategic settings. 
• Account for performance measurement system design choices. 

The student can: 

• Generalize the insights of research within the scope of contemporary managerial accounting topics. 
• Identify and apply the generalized insight to solve a management accounting issue. 
• Criticize and reflect upon underlying assumptions regarding all topics. 

Examples: 

• Demski, J., "Managerial Uses of Accounting Information", 2. edition, Springer 2008. Articles, cases and lecture notes. 
• Zimmerman, J.L., “Accounting for Decision Making and Control”, 9. edition, McGraw-Hill 2016.
• Robert S. Kaplan and Anthony A. Atkinson “Advanced Management Accounting”, 3. edition, Prentice Hall, 1998
• Selected scientific articles. 
• Lecture notes, cases and exercises.

Scheduled classes:

3 hours of lectures pr. week in 15 weeks. 

Workload:

For an average student, the expected workload is divided as follows:
Lectures: 45 hours.
Preparation for lectures: 150 hours.
Preparation and writing of assignments: 30 hours.
Preparation of the exam: 45 hours.

In total: 270 hours.