The paper “Management accounting. Performance evaluation tool" aims to detail some theoretical and methodological aspects of management accounting and cost calculation, offering practical solutions to specialists, managers, students and master students who follow the specialization courses" Accounting and Management Informatics "," Managerial Accounting ", "Financial Management and Audit", as well as to all those interested in deepening the concepts of this discipline.
The concepts, ideas, applications considered in this paper are based on experience gained through doctoral and specialized studies conducted in collaboration with specialists and university professors in the field of management accounting, studies that have been published in various journals, both from country, as well as from abroad, and which allowed the author to expand his area of knowledge and deepening of various issues related to management accounting and cost calculation.
The paper begins with a description of the current concepts of management accounting, presenting various definitions, objectives, functions and role of management accounting and cost calculation. The similarities and differences between financial and management accounting are also presented. Next, the author describes the general framework of the normalization of management accounting in Romania, the profile and attributions of the management accountant, as well as the document system used. In a simplistic manner, the author describes the premises, factors and principles of organization of management accounting and cost calculation. This chapter stands out through the presentation and general analysis of the management accounts system in our country, analyzing the causes of existing deficiencies and trying to propose solutions to improve the methods used in Romania compared to other advanced methods of management accounting and cost calculation.
By debating the notion of expenditure and the specific criteria for classifying expenditures, including the procedures for determining, delimiting and allocating expenditures, the author tries to establish the general framework necessary to determine the cost of production. The treatment of costs in the national and international literature is captured in a Management Accounting. The tool for evaluating the performance of another chapter of this paper, this being accompanied by the presentation of the calculation procedures per product unit and of the interdependent manufacturing production.
A special chapter is dedicated to management accounting and costing methods that address this concept and proposes a classification of costing methods starting from the two main categories, namely: full-costing methods and methods partial-costing. Thus, total type methods were described and analyzed, such as: global method, phase method, order method, standard cost method, activity cost calculation method, target cost method, but also partial type method as variable cost method. In order to facilitate the understanding of the theoretical aspects debated, the paper is accompanied by numerous examples that have highlighted the ways of accounting and cost analysis and the advantages and disadvantages of each method. These applied studies are based on the latest appearances of theoretical and practical works published by prestigious university professors in our country, but also by some foreign authors who have contributed to the development of concepts, theories and methods, used more and more. in the specialized practice from which the beneficiaries are the users of internal information, but also external ones.
The paper concludes with an exposition of ways of reporting information from management accounting and the creation of a set of accounting summary documents, such as the income statement and other analysis and reporting situations. These proposals, accompanied by practical examples based on an intense theoretical and practical documentation, are followed by the presentation of the advantages and disadvantages of the accounting summary documents.
The material used in this paper is in the process of improvement and completion with other elements useful for understanding the specific notions of management accounting and cost calculation. Certainly some of the issues addressed are elliptical in terms of theoretical presentation, but we hope that they are mitigated after reviewing the examples and case studies.
The bibliography on which this paper is based is presented, selectively at the end and offers the possibility of deepening knowledge for those interested.
Prof. univ. Dr. Sorin BRICIU