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Management Accounting Hoorcollege Aantekeningen 2021
Management Accounting Hoorcollege Aantekeningen 2021
Management Accounting
Hoorcollege 1
Inleiding
Management accounting measures and reports financial and non-financial information and helps and
motivates managers to make good decisions to fulfill an organization’s goals.
Management accounting is a value-adding continuous improvement process of planning, designing,
measuring and operating both nonfinancial information systems and financial information systems
that guides management action, motivates behavior, and supports and creates the cultural value
necessary to achieve an organization’s strategic, tactical and operating objectives.
Cost accounting measures and reports financial and non-financial data that relates to the cost of
acquiring or consuming resources by an organization.
Decide on company’s goals, decide how to attain these goals, plan resource usage
and allocation, predict results
Hoorcollege 2
Cost accounting
Terminology
- Part of cost = giving up an alternative, also called opportunity cost
- Actual vs. budgeted costs (schatting van kosten)
Responsibility accounting
If decentralized organization structure responsibility centers
Different types of responsibility centers
- Cost center: accountable for costs, bijv. Onderhoud, it-support ondersteunende diensten,
want ze hebben vaak niet veel te maken met de verkoop maar zijn wel belangrijk
- Revenue center: accountable for revenues
- Profit center: accountable for revenues and costs, bijv. Starbucks
- Investment center: accountable for revenues, costs and investments, bijv. Headquarters
Examples:
- Management
- Support staff
- Energy and rent
Cost object
= thing for which cost information is needed
Examples:
- Products or product lines
- Departments or business unit
- Projects or programs
- Service
- Activity or process
- Customers
Depends on individual situation or interest
Cost = Σ monetary values of all resources needed to achieve the cost object = complex
Cost accumulation stage 1 bookkeeping
Complex: Assigning to departments (cost object) is already difficult, To the product level even more
complex e.g. Philips, Siemens
e.g. IT kosten
verdelen naar HRM,
Dept. Finance,
Accounting,
Economics, etc.
Indirect/direct Depends on cost object. E.g. wage production manager direct if cost object is prod.
department, wage production manager indirect when cost object is product (e.g. car)
High-low method
a = intercept = approximation of fixed costs
b = slope of the line = variable costs
line tries to explain data in the relevant range of
observations
theoretically, intercept equals fixed costs only when
relevant range includes 0.
Cost driver:
- All costs dependend on one cost
driver
- Economic sense: most crucial cost
driver, relevance for business
- Multiple cost drivers are often
needed for detailed analysis
Regression method
more accurate and powerfull than HL method
Cost-volume-profit analyses
Assumptions CVP
- Revenues/costs change due to the same driver = output
- Linear behavior of cost and revenue functions
- Unit variable cost, fixed cost and selling prices are known and are assumed to be constant
- No inventory-levels assumed, all cost and revenuws are added without taking into account
time value for money
Break-even point
= output level for zero profit
- Method 1: equation method
Revenue – all costs = 0
USP x Q – UVC x Q – FC = 0
- Method 2: contribution method
OP = USP x Q -UVC x Q – FC
OP = (USP – UVC) x Q – FC
Q = (FC +OP) / (USP – UVC)
- Method 3: graphical analysis of break-even point
Target profit
Output level to achieve a given profit objective (target: TOP)
Assume that LG wants to realize a Target operating profit (TOP) of 350,000 euro FC = 1,000,000 euro;
UVC = 100; USP = 200 How much units does it has to sell?
Influence of taxes
Assume 30% tax-rate. Does break-even point for the LG example
changes?
What happens with the number of units that LG needs to sell if it still
wants to earn an after tax result of 350 000 euro
often in spreadsheets
Subcontracting
Effect of alternative cost schemes in contracting
Option 1: an outside subcontractor offers LG to produce the screens at a cost per unit of 130 euro
(fully variable cost structure)
Option 2: an outside subcontractor asks a fixed fee of 2.000.000 per period to meet up the demand of
LG (full fixed fee structure)
What does this mean for the demand risk (volatility) of LG?
Assume that LG has outside contracting options of a fully variable cost structure of 130 $ per unit or
fully fixed cost structure of 2.000.000 and selling price for LG = 200 $ per unit. Which contractor
should it choose, knowing that market for low budget LED TV’s = 9000 units (30% probability) or
19000 units (70% probability)?
Hoorcollege 3
Cost accounting
Job-costing systems = cost objects are individual units, batches or lots of a distinct product or service
distinct units, services, jobs: hard to standardize
Process-costing systems = cost objects are identical or similar units, products or services
mass production, easily comparable and easy to standardize
Hybrid systems = combination of job- and process-costing systems
Big, diversified companies often with combination: different tasks/companies require different cost
system approaches
- Long-term impacts
Balance sheet, i.e. on inventory ending balance
Net income and ratios
o Stock price and firm value
o Cost of short- and long-term debt financing
o Cost of equity
With more product & service diversification and more complex company structures, cost tracing and
allocation becomes more challenging
Job costing
Idea is to assign costs to a specific job
Examples: accounting audit for a firm, construction of an individual house
Steps to cost a job
- Identify cost object
- Identify directs costs of the job
- Trace direct costs to the job
- Accumulate overhead (indirect) costs in cost pools
- Select an allocation base (oorzakelijk verband, verdeelsleutel, bijv. aantal eenheden)
- Calculate the overhead rate per unit or per selected cost driver
- Allocate overhead costs to jobs based on application base (cost driver)
Direct materials and direct labor = tracing = job sheet, time records, bar-coding
Indirect cost or overhead = allocating = difficult to say how much overhead one job takes =
assumptions are needed cause – effect
Process costing
Production costs assigned to many units of identical or similar units, products or services
mass production, easily comparable and easy to standardize (specific products and industries)
When WIP at both the start and end of the production period
weighted average (WA) vs. FIFO
Cost flow assumptions
- WA
Focus on work done to date: more averaging
Equivalent units of finished and unfinished products treated equally
- FIFO
Finish first the WIP in opening stock
All new products produced after
Separation of old and new products
What does this mean?
- COGS and inventory affected
- Costs can be shifted and cost rates can be affected
Why could this matter?
- Targets, performance evaluation and performance-based pay
- Profit and tax determination
Hoorcollege 4
Cost accounting
Standard costing
Setting standards (budgets) for quantities of inputs simplifies costing process. Assume that costs per
equivalent can be reliably computed in advance and then be used: standard costs
Standard (budgeted) rates: e.g., for DM and conversion
- More efficient and timely (e.g. used for pricing)
- Less accurate (e.g., better use actual costs to determine profits and evaluate performance)
Transferred-in costs
- More than one operating division: units can move from division to division
- Costs are also transferred: transferred-in costs
- Costs in one division affect costs of the next division: impact for performance evaluation?
- Transferred-in costs treated as a separate type of DM added in the beginning
Joint costs
When a production process leads to the creation of many products:
- Dairy firm: raw milk cream butter
- Oil refinery: crude oil LPG, gasoline, diesel
- Chicken farm: chicken wings, drumsticks, weaste
Joint costs (JC): costs of single production process that yields multiple products
Split-of-point: the place in the production where two or more products become separately
identifiable
Separable costs: all cost incurred beyond the split-off point which are assignable to each of the
separated products
Joint cost allocation arbitrary/with a lot of discretion. Hard to get a good cause-effect relationship.
Problem: joint cost allocation and loss making products The choice of the method of joint costs
allocation should not impede otherwise beneficial future decisions, e.g. selling or further processing
decisions (e.g. sunk costs)
Allocation methods
Physical measures
Allocation of JC to men perfume:
(5000)/(5000 + 10000) * 270000 = 90000
Comparison of methods
- Cause-effect-relation difficult
- Benefits received from product are often good criteria
Sales at split off or NRV (both also with meaningful, common denominator)
Sales value at split off simpler and it does not anticipate future decisions
Physical measures may be good cost driver and available when prices are hard to use
- Different joint costs allocation methods have different costs of information gathering and
accuracies of measurement
- Careful:
The choice of the method of joint costs allocation should not impede otherwise
beneficial future decisions, e.g. selling or further processing decisions (sunk costs)
Transferred goods between different departments
Hoorcollege 5
Cost accounting
Allocation methods
Direct method
Widely used, ignores mutual
services between supporting
departments
Step-down method
Partly recognizes mutual services, requires ranking of support departments
If S1 is ranked first, S1 costs allocated to S2, O1, O2
Then S2 costs allocated to O1 and O2
Rangschikking zou kunnen op basis van meeste diensten, het duurste, etc.
In dit geval op basis van aantal computers. Dus eerst IT, dan HR, ACC, FIN
Reciprocal method
Traditional costing
Often one single cost pool for plant-wide overhead
Allocation base often volume driven (based on direct cost)
- Input related = # of machine hours, labor hours, total DL cost
- Output related = # of units produced, nr. Of units sold
Frequent problems
- High volume, simple products: overpriced / over costed
- Low volume, complex product: under costed / underpriced
- Product subsidization: few products sponsor many loss products
ABC
Goal: better cause-effect relation
between costs and products
Refined costing should yield more
detailed cost information
Cost hierarchy
A cost hierarchy categorizes costs into different cost pools on the basis of the different types of cost
driver or different degrees of difficulty in determining cause-and-effect relationships
Typically 4 levels
Evaluation of ABC
Advantage: more accurate, better informed decision-making
- Pricing decisions: what prices do we need to set to be profitable?
- Product (mix) decisions: which products/services should we make? Which production steps
are value-adding
- Cost reductions: where and how can we save costs by improving the production process
Disadvantage: complexity and implementation costs
- Products that a company is well suited to make and sell show small profits, whereas products
that a company is less suited to produce and sell show large profits.
- Complex products appear to be very profitable, and simple products appear to be losing
money. Related: winning of auctions for complex, losing of auctions for simple products -
Competitors’ prices appear unrealistically low
- Operations staff have significant disagreements with the accounting staff about the costs of
manufacturing and marketing products and services.
Hoorcollege 6
Cost accounting
Absorption costing
Product cost = all manufacturing cost = DL + DM + VarOH + FixOH man included in production costs
and inventoried
Period cost = all non-manufacturing cost (=marketing) expensed
Variable costing
Product cost = only variable manufacturing cost = DL + DM + VarOH included in production costs
and inventoried
Period cost = all non-manufacturing cost + FixOH man expensed
Management incentives
Absorption costing with incentives to overproduce to reduce unit costs: form of real earnings
management
Methods to reduce this…
- keep track of stock building (closing stock t/closing stock t-1)
- switch to variable costing
- longer time period to evaluate managers
- Careful budgeting (budgeted production figures)
- JIT-production, non-financial performance evaluation
Hoorcollege 7
Planning & control
Decision control
Management control towards goals
- Translate plans into concrete actions budgets, responsibility centers
- Deviations of operations against original plan variance analyses, BSC
- Performance management and evaluation bonus / compensation
Budgets
Budget = the quantitative expression of company’s action plan
Master budget includes operating and financial planning
- Operating planning: how to use (scares) resources
- Financial planning: how to get fund to acquire resources
Typically for one year period sub-periods (month, quarter) rolling budgets (continuous updating)
Summarized in a set of budgeted financial statements
Management tool for planning and controlling
Master budget
Quantify and operationalize company’s strategic goals
Encourage planning management must look ahead
- Overcome past misallocations and sub-standard performance
Budgeting cycle
- Planning the performance of the organization
- Providing a frame of reference = a set of specific expectations against which actual results are
compared
- Investigating variations
- Correcting action
- Planning again
Operating budget
- Supporting budget schedules
- Revenue budget
- Production budget in units
- Direct materials purchase budget
- Direct labor budget
- Cost of goods sold budget
- Non-manufacturing cots budget
operating income budgeted P&L
Financial budget
Capital budget = which long-term projects to finance
identify investments choose investment follow-up
Cash budget = when we are short (rich) of cash
available cash = beginning cash balance less min cash balance
Responsibility accounting
System for evaluating the performance of managers based on activities under their supervision
Responsibility centers
- Cost responsible only for costs
- Revenue responsible only for revenues
- Profit responsible for revenues, costs, profit
- Investment responsible for revenues, cost, profit and investment
controllability
Hoorcollege 8
Planning & control
Variances
Budgeted result actual result
Variance is favorable (F) or unfavorable (U)
Variances overview
e.g. done for production budget (DM budget, DL budget, production overhead budget)
Efficiency variance: how much input should have been used for output (act. quantity of input –
bud. quantity of input for act. output) * bud. price of input Ev (or Qv) = (Qa – Qb )* Pb
Qb = budget quantity of input for actual output)
Variable overhead variances
Level 0 and level 1: static budget variance
Interpretations
- Spending variance is about the prices of the overhead costs (similar to price variance)
- Efficiency variance is about the efficiency of the use of the cost allocation base
Fixed overhead variances
There is no ‘flexing’ of fixed overhead costs
There is no sales-volume variance of fixed overhead costs budgeted fixed costs are unaffected by
volume changes
There is no efficiency variance a manager cannot be more or less efficient in dealing with a given
amount of fixed costs
On level 3, the flexible budget variance = spending variance
But there is a new kind of variance for fixed overhead production-volume variance
Production-volume variance
Over- and under-allocated costs
- Under absorption-costing, fixed overhead is allocated to products during the year
- A rate is derived from budgeted fixed costs and budgeted volume at start of the period
- If budgeted volume is missed, costs can be over-/ und
- er-allocated
Under- or overallocated (absorbed) overhead = 3’075 + 4’167 + 625 – 1’000 = 6’867 (U)
Double check: compare actual costs with costs allocated to products
- Actual manufacturing OH = 28’700 (variable) + 24 ’000 (fixed) = 52 ’ 700
- Manufacturing OH allocated = 25 ’000 (variable) + 20 ’833 (fixed) = 45 ’833
- Difference: 6’867 (U)
Mix variance: ∑ [( act. mix % - bud. mix % ) * act. total quantity * bud. price]
- Oranges: (0,625 – 0,65) * 1’600 * 1,00 = 40 (F)
- Grapefruits: (0,375 – 0,35) * 1’600 * 0,80 = 32 (U)
- Total mix variance: 8 (F)
Yield variance: ∑[( act. total quantity – bud. total quantity) * bud. mix % * bud. price]
- Oranges: (1’600 – 1 ’500) * 0,65 * 1,00 = 65 (U)
- Grapefruits: (1’600 – 1 ’500) * 0,35 * 0,80 = 28 (U)
- Total yield variance: 93 (U)
Hoorcollege 9
Decision making
Decisions like:
- One-off special orders
- In- or outsourcing of products (make or buy)
- Decide on product mix under
capacity constraints
- Customer decisions (add/drop
or different prices)
Direct labor cost = variable; can we reassign workers (Y/N?) outsourcing means loss of jobs!
Ethics meets costs
Outsourcing
PRO’s CONTRA’s
Profit from lower production costs due to Propriety costs
competitive advantages of suppliers
Location (e.g. lower wages) Dependencies (e.g. loss knowledge/expertise
that cannot easily be reactivated)
Skills (more advanced technology or knowledge) Local/communal responsibility: can mean laying
off employees
No fixed costs in own books Employee identity and corporate culture
Leaner production Reputation risks
Focus on core activities and strategic strengths Quality concerns
Costs of quality
Develop financial and non-financial measures to monitor conformance quality and design quality
analyze ABC of quality
Throughput accounting
Relief constraints on bottleneck operations
- Additional machine
- Outsourcing
Actions
- Are more important if focused on the bottleneck
Theory of constraints
= A technique where the primary goal is to maximize throughput while simultaneously maintaining or
decreasing inventory and operating costs
Theory of constraints analyzes production through a series of steps.
1. Identify the system constraint
Is the constraint internal, for example, in production, engineering or planning? Is it external,
for example, in the market?
2. Decide how to maximize the output from the constraint
Once a constraint has been rectified, go back to step one to identify the next most serious
constraint and repeat.
3. Subordinate everything else to the decisions made in Step 2.
The main point here is that the production capacity of the bottleneck resource should
determine the production schedule for the organization as a whole.
4. Elevate the system’s bottlenecks
Take actions to increase bottleneck efficiency and capacity. The objective is to increase
throughput contribution minus the incremental costs of taking such actions
Recap
- Always compare the alternative course of action (make or buy, accept offer yes or no)
- Consider the incremental costs or savings! Cost and revenues that are relevant to the
decision
- Are there any opportunity costs (e.g. not producing means freed-up capacity: can be
lucratively used for other things)
- Most of the time fixed (past) cost are irrelevant (e.g. regardless whether we produce or not,
plant facilities are there sunk cost; they do not differ across alternatives)
- Be careful of fixed cost allocations, have to be spread on existing customers/products if one
customer or product is dropped
Hoorcollege 10
Decision making
Price decisions
What price to charge for the products / serviced delivered by
the firm? one of the most difficult business decisions.
- Price should not be too high
- Price should not be too high
P marginal revenue = marginal cost
Why not using this method?
- Companies do not have information about marginal
costs because
Marginal cost function is too difficult to estimate
Too expensive to gather all the data for estimating the MC function
- Assumes that the company has perfect information about supply and demand curve
Pricing based on cost information is second-best
Market-driven approach
Market price – desired profit = target cost
Value engineering: what do customers really want? reduce value-added costs and eliminate non
value-added costs
- Locked-in costs (=designed-in costs) focuses on the moment when the decision is made
that a cost will be incurred in the future
- Cost incurrence
Focuses on the moment when the cost is used up, when the company has to pay for
it
Costing systems emphasize cost incurrence
Potential problems with value engineering:
- Risk that cost reduction leads to quality decreases
- Proceeds with cross-functional teams (development time, language, bonus, …)
Cost-based approach
Price = cost + (markup percentage * cost)
How to determine the mark-up? use target rate of return on investment
- Sometimes difficult to determine the invested capital
- Determine mark-up based on different cost bases
Variable manufacturing costs
Variable product costs lower mark-up
Full product costs percentages
- Benefits of including fixed costs in the cost base
Full product cost recovery
Price stability
Simplicity
Disadvantage of including fixed costs in the cost base
Example Toyota
Suppose:
- Produce and sell 9 000 000 cars per year
- Manufacturing costs / unit = € 20 000 / unit
- Sales and marketing costs = €40 500 mio / year €4 500/unit
- Price > € 24 500/unit
Change in supply of cars: Stop producing diesel cars end 2018
Consequence:
- Produce and sell 7 000 000 units per year
- Manufacturing costs / unit = € 20 000 / unit
- Sales and marketing costs = €40 500 mio / year €5 785/unit
- Price > € 25 785/unit
Price increases Demand decreases Sales fall … Price increases…
Supply-driven versus demand-driven death spiral
fixed costs do not change with volume changes
Transfer pricing
TP as part of management control systems
Transfer pricing = internal price between divisions (buy and sell from each other)
= especially in decentralized firms
= part of a management control system
TP from the selling division to the buying division is not recorded in the company’s income statement.
A firm produces and sells products in a market. The firm is centralized and top management makes all
decisions. Revenue and cost functions are given:
R(Q) = Q * (100 – 2Q) random functions for revenues and costs based on quantity Q in
C(Q) = Q2/2 centralized firm
At which Q is profit maximized? take first derivative of profit function = revenue – costs
Maximize (100Q – 2Q2) – Q2/2
d/df [(100Q – 2Q2) – Q2/2] = 0
100 – 4Q – Q = 0
Q = 20
Q = 20 gives maximum profit level (given this R & C function) in centralized firm
This department
has to take into
account the TP
received from the
other dep. (20Q =
revenue)
Approximations:
1. Market based
2. Cost plus
3. Negotiated
Different effects on goal congruence, motivation and effort. Variations in profits at divisional level
Solutions:
Variable cost: production’s FC are not covered
Dual TP: full cost for production, variable cost for sales, difference is for corporate
level
- Tax is also an important determinant of the transfer price, but not always in line with the best
transfer price from a control perspective
- Dual pricing system (one for tax purposes, one for control)
- Many international rules try to prevent it
Transfer mispricing
Based on US import and export data (2001), the authors found several examples of abnormally priced
transactions: Some examples:
- toothbrushes imported from the UK for $5,655
- flash lights imported from Japan for $5,000
- cotton dishtowels imported from Pakistan for $153 each
- car seats exported to Belgium for $1.66 each
Hoorcollege 11
Operating as independent parties Operating as related parties
Hoorcollege 12
Management control
Disadvantages of ROI
- Focus on a ratio, is optimizing the ratio, general trend to disinvest: reduce the asset base
(dysfunctional) will increase the ratio
- Expensive investments are not undertaken (assets increase), LT-effect?
- Goal congruence is not achieved, sometimes new investments on a subunit level are not
beneficial to the subunit, but are beneficial from a company viewpoint
Solutions: residual income and economic value added
Residual income
Conclusions
Different measures may lead to different conclusions regarding the performance of a subunit. EVA
and RI have less goal congruence problems than ROI.
EVA:
- Only measure focusing on after-tax profits
- Takes into account different sources of funding: debt and equity
- EVA is difficult to calculate: WACC, adjusting bookkeeping profits to ‘economic’ profits is not
easy to do