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Process costing is an accounting methodology that traces and accumulates direct costs, and allocates indirect costs of a manufacturing process. [1] Costs are assigned to products, usually in a large batch, which might include an entire month's production. Eventually, costs have to be allocated to individual units of product.
An important part of standard cost accounting is a variance analysis, which breaks down the variation between actual cost and standard costs into various components (volume variation, material cost variation, labor cost variation, etc.) so managers can understand why costs were different from what was planned and take appropriate action to ...
Lean accounting methods have been developed in recent years to provide relevant and thorough accounting, control, and measurement systems without the complex and costly methods of manually driven ABC. Lean accounting is primarily used within lean manufacturing. The approach has proven useful in many service industry areas including healthcare ...
If the accountant is using a general ledger accounting system, which lacks true job costing functionality, the costs must be manually transferred out of Work in Process to Finished Goods (Cost of Goods Sold for service industries). Of course, in the days of computerized job costing software, journaling costs manually is an obsolete process.
Management accountants (also called managerial accountants) look at the events that happen in and around a business while considering the needs of the business. From this, data and estimates emerge. Cost accounting is the process of translating these estimates and data into knowledge that will ultimately be used to guide decision-making. [5]
Independent research evaluating the use of automated expense management systems has confirmed that the cost of processing an expense claim is reduced as the level of automation increases. Organizations may automate their expense management processes for reasons such as compliance, cost reduction, control, and employee productivity. [1]
Cost engineering is "the engineering practice devoted to the management of project cost, involving such activities as estimating, cost control, cost forecasting, investment appraisal and risk analysis". [1] "Cost Engineers budget, plan and monitor investment projects. They seek the optimum balance between cost, quality and time requirements." [2]
In particular, it was the need for audited accounts that sealed the fate of managerial cost accounting. The dominance of financial reporting accounting over management accounting remains to this day with few exceptions, and the financial reporting definitions of 'cost' have distorted effective management 'cost' accounting since that time. This ...